to IRL
In today’s economy, it’s more important than ever to meet your customers where they are. Whether online, in person, or a hybrid of both, retail channels that started as short-term strategies to survive the COVID-19 pandemic have now become long-term sales verticals for many companies. From brick-and-mortar establishments that are now embracing e-commerce to online-only brands that have pivoted to in-real-life (IRL) storefronts, businesses are bridging the gap between the digital and physical.
In this Bloom Season case study by Travers Johnson, we explore how Portrait Coffee, a specialty coffee brand in Atlanta, GA, has diversified their retail channels and embraced change to build vital new verticals for their business. Keep reading for details on how this company went from URL to IRL, as well as best practices for how your business can, too.
The Portrait Coffee story has been brewing for nearly a decade. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Fender has traveled across the globe and worked in various parts of the coffee supply chain over the years. “I've had the opportunity to travel to Africa, to go to the origin and see how coffee is grown, processed, exported, all of that,” he explains.
What he learned in his travels both irritated and inspired him. Despite much of the world’s coffee being produced in Africa and South America—often grown by small, independent farmers—people of color were not reaping the benefits of their labor. “Whether it was a Scandinavian minimalist coffee shop or a neighborhood café here in America, I realized who was profiting from trading coffee—anyone but the Black & brown folks producing the coffee,” he says.
And so began Fender’s quest to pour a new narrative for specialty coffee. The company aims to offer exceptionally roasted coffee and culture in a socially conscious way.“
We want to change the picture that comes to people's mind when they think of specialty coffee,” he says. “We think that Black folks really have been cropped out of that photo.”
Physical location played a big part in that vision. Being based in the heart of Atlanta’s West End—a historic neighborhood with a rich history of Black entrepreneurship and culture—was important to Fender and his co-founders, Erin Fender, John and Shawndra Onwuchekwa, Marcus Hollinger, and Khalid Smith.
“The heartbeat of Portrait has always been in the context of community,” Fender says. “We are all residents of Southwest Atlanta, and we really wanted to have an impact in this community considering the rich history of Black folks in this part of town.”
After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the team began to build Portrait’s brick-and-mortar shop in January 2020. “We really wanted Portrait to have a home, and so our physical space was always a part of who we really wanted to be, to deliver on that promise of community,” he shared.
However, just 2 months into the construction process, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Atlanta and their plans for a physical café were brought to a screeching halt.
The same week that the lockdown began—and his team’s dreams of a physical storefront seemed to end—Aaron happened upon an article that would change his outlook and the course of his business. Leading Beyond the Blizzard: Why Every Organization Is Now a Startup by Andy Crouch, Kurt Keilhacker, and Dave Blanchard predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic represented a fundamental disruption to business and our world. Crouch urged business leaders to “treat COVID-19 as an economic and cultural beginning of a ‘little ice age’ a once-in-a-lifetime change that is likely to affect our lives and organizations for years.”
Fender and his team took Crouch’s words to heart. They recognized that they were at the beginning a period of disruption not unlike the Great Recession, and reflected on all the successful companies—Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook—that took off during that time.
“Our team realized that how people drink coffee might change forever,” he explained. “So that was really the impetus to shift our focus from being a physical business to being a digital brand.”
The fact that Fender had recently left his job to focus on Portrait Coffee full-time certainly added a sense of urgency, and surprisingly, freedom to the situation. “All of a sudden we weren't afraid of failure anymore,” he says. “There was the freedom to try new things.”
And they tried lots of new things. Like many food and beverage businesses, they initially dipped their toes into e-commerce via a mobile delivery service. This served them well for the first 8 weeks of the lockdown while consumers stayed home. But as people began to venture out more and rely less on delivery, they realized that their time and energy would be better spent focusing on another revenue model: their “Coffee Club” subscription service.
In the Coffee Club, they found a long-term hit. Club members receive a 12 oz.-bag of coffee at delivery intervals of their choosing—options range from once a week to once a month—and are able to try new coffee varieties before anyone else.
The success of the Coffee Club has led them to offer other e-commerce products, including 9 varieties of specialty coffee bags and a variety of branded merchandise including coffee mugs and hoodies.
“E-commerce has become a leading vertical for our business, which is really cool,” Fender says.
With their Coffee Club and online merchandise sales proving to be sustainable, the team has now directed their focus to expanding into wholesale and revisiting physical retail. “We’ve had a few wholesale partners that have been phenomenal for offering us a whole lot of demand,” Fender shared.
The team is moving forward with the preconstruction of their physical café , but has reimagined its purpose. Initially, the physical space was to serve as the primary source of retail, but Fender and team now realize that the physical location can also serve a more symbolic purpose. “We think that the physical space will be an extension of storytelling for our brand,” Fender says. “So we're really excited about that.”
But don’t think that the future of Portrait Coffee means the end of their burgeoning e-commerce empire. In fact, it’s the opposite. “We'll always have a digital presence,” Fender assures. “And not just that—we plan on doubling down on digital.”
