Danny O'Neill - Finding the perfect customer

0:05- The lemonade stand's a good, a very good analogy. You have to be where the people are. No matter how beautiful and cool and neat your lemonade stand is, if there aren't any people around, you know, you're not going to do very well. So we get the coffee, we roast it, and then we want to sell it to somebody.

0:22Well who wants to buy it? So you have to find your audience. How are they going to know you have it? Well that's marketing. I think in a broad society there's this notion oh I just need to get open, I just need to get open whether it's a store, a restaurant, or an internet site today.

0:38They just think that when they open that storefront or open that website, the world's gonna come find them. And then the money will roll in. I need to put myself front and center and have a compelling product and a compelling story for you to be able to make that risk and buy my coffee.

0:56In the early 90's and even to some extent right now, we're kind of an immature industry in we're snobby and we're pretentious. If you were a discerning customer interested in quality coffee, I didn't really care where you were sitting. If you were at a coffee house or at the grocery store.

1:15Women buy 75% of the coffee and women do 75% of the shopping and women are in the grocery stores and that's where they want to buy it. And then the other notion was you can't sell quality coffee in offices. So we didn't get caught up on all those kind of fool's end arguments in my mind about where quality coffee should be sold.

1:36It worked out really well. We didn't know it at the time, but we were establishing ourselves in these various market channels. It was complicated, but again we didn't really know any better and we just did it, we figured it out. So today we've established ourselves pretty solidly in various market channels.

1:53There's a couple things about coffee that are somewhat different. Sometimes you hear it described as an affordable luxury. Coffee has gone through up to nine sets of human fingers. It's taken a year for a coffee tree to produce a pound or a pound and a half. It's taken five years to get to that point where it can produce that for its full crop.

2:14And then that pound of coffee's going to produce 50 to 55 cups. So I can get all that for 15 cents and a couple of minutes at my house? That is a steal. So I'm gonna sell to the people who love the taste of coffee and love coffee. I'm not going for the person that just wants a little caffeine to go.

2:35Back in the day it was pretty easy and when I was putting this plan together it was higher the education, the higher the specialty coffee. The higher the income, the higher the specialty coffee. Those were two still strong pieces of data. But today, kids have grown up with quality.

2:51They know quality coffee. The ones that know it, know it and they like it and they know what they like. They have five bucks, they'll buy a cappuccino and a biscotti. Kids have grown up today with quality so it's a different market we're selling to, a much greater and wider audience.