How I Created (& Sold) A Purpose Driven Brand

Find out the key learnings & how innovators can apply them

Like a lot of people I found myself a little bored outside of working hours in lockdown and wanting to make the most of it, I thought I’d try something a bit different. I’ve created simple websites in the past and thought it would be interesting to try that again but with my innovation hat on!

Whilst in the Insight & Innovation team at Samaritans we worked closely with brilliant secondees from John Lewis who tested an online store for Samaritans. I was surprised at how professional the shop looked at such a low cost. We also researched some e-commerce models and this is where I first heard about dropshipping.

In a nutshell, dropshipping is a business model where an online shop doesn’t own stock or distribute it – it simply sells it and when an order is received, buys it and orders it from the supplier. The profit margin is obviously lower than if you owned the stock but the benefits are obvious: it’s very low-risk as no up-front financial investment required. With the right product, it can be very profitable.

This is what I wanted to focus on and decided to sell one of my main passions in life....coffee!

Photo by Fahmi Fakhrudin on Unsplash

Insight

Why coffee? From a personal point of view, I was really missing my daily flat white I used to get most mornings when commuting into central London. In fact, I was missing it so much that I splashed out on an espresso machine and taught myself to become a barista (...with a limited degree of success!). I then started to do some research and, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the only one. In November 2020 the search term ‘coffee machine’ was the highest it’s been since google trends began (see below).

Market

When I looked into it further I realised the coffee market was hugely saturated. This isn’t surprising as it’s a widely available commodity, but the majority of brands out there are going after the mass market and don’t have a hugely compelling value proposition. I set up a store with this in mind and thought: what are people are passionate about and how can I tie this in with selling coffee? A quick scroll through Instagram (mine anyway) gives you the answer: their pets - especially dogs! So I created a brand focused on giving back to dogs with a portion of profits being donated to dog charities. This left me with a distinct and pretty big target audience: speciality coffee drinkers & dog lovers.  

So how did I go about it?

I was very much learning as I went! But below is a break down of the steps I took:

1.   Researched dropshipping, e-commerce and new product development by watching YouTube videos - there’s tons of free information out there including how to build audiences and free tools to use.

2.   Created an Instagram account and started generating content on before launching. I also created a Shopify account and used the free trial to test out different themes before going live.

3.   Designed all assets (coffee labels, web and social images) with a free Canva account.

4.   Partnered with a white-label coffee dropshipper.

5.   Built relationships and partnered with charities who agreed to promote the online shop in return for donations.

6.   Set up a lead magnet and automated email journeys: these are already available via free apps on Shopify, I just tailored them slightly and needed a few new assets.

What was the up front cost of all this? £0. I learnt from free YouTube videos, set up a free Shopify account, set up a free email account and set up a free account with a coffee supplier.

This is just on example of how people massively over-estimate the cost and risk involved in starting a new venture.

The results

Bearing in mind I spent c6 hours a week max in the first few weeks and just updating social as well with dog photos (which was quite fun to be honest), I was happy with the results:

• Revenue of $4,100 in three months. This totally smashed my expectations as I hadn't invested in marketing - just building a community

• 3.69% conversion rate from all web visitors

• 15.5% returning customer rate

• 142 total orders with an average order value (AOV) of £21.49

• 33 positive customer reviews 

Learnings and thoughts

This was obviously an experiment and a bit of a development opportunity but it did spark some thoughts about how innovation teams could be having more impact:

1.  Testing a new proposition has never been easier (or cheaper!)

Now that these brilliant platforms exist, how can innovation teams persuade internal stakeholders to do more ‘real life’ digital testing – this doesn’t necessarily need to use the charities’ brand. This will help create a tendency for action and give innovation/product teams the data before bringing it back into the organisation and going through the governance process. This will help create an insight-led approach to product development.

2. Can innovation or product teams skills be used to help create new governance processes?

There are some obvious benefits to working outside a Business As Usual (BAU) processes I realised whist working on this, the main one being you answer your hypothesis quicker and feedback on customer desirability is almost immediate. Going through a BAU process with a proposition which hasn’t reached MVP stage yet can be riskier in terms of resource as it can rely on a large number of internal teams without it being fully validated being there's no guarantee or ROI. As some digital product and innovation people are brilliant at agile processes, could their role within organisations adapt to include the creation of a new process for ‘new stuff’ which allows input from stakeholders but doesn’t slow things down?

3. Should creating ventures which do social good be the focus of innovation teams?

With a focus on brand being more purpose-driven and a move a way from more ‘tokenistic’ partnerships, consumers are mote used to socially conscious brands. So could charities focus on ventures which do good and generate income rather than fundraising products? And could businesses incorporate this into their objectives?

4. Niche is good

I’ve become (even) more sceptical of ‘mass market’ products or products which just target a demographic. When I hear ‘mass market’ I now hear ‘I don’t know my target audience or their needs’. By targeting everyone you’ll reach no one.

5. Stick to minimum viable product (MVP) principles

Organisations tend to use MVPs to make money rather than validate their idea. There’s a gap in between testing and product launches. The critical assumption that testing such as smoke-screen tests, surveys and interviews can fail to deliver on for an income generating product is: will people actually part with their hard-earned cash to donate or pay for it (aka is the idea viable?). When MVPs are launched there is a pressure for them to scale straight away. A business such as this one could be seen as a half-way house i.e. it’s small, outside of long-winded bureaucratic BAU processes, uses DIY tools and is very cheap….but does validate the idea.

Has this triggered any thoughts or learnings from you? Let me know in the comments below!

Please note this article was published on LinkedIn originally so may contain references which are now out of date.