A subscription brand that outgrew the marketplace
A roaster doing well on someone else's platform and keeping none of the relationship. We built the brand, the store and the subscription it needed to stand alone.
The brief
Halcyon roasts in small batches and had built a genuine following, all of it on a marketplace that owned the customer, set the discounts and took a cut of every bag. They wanted a direct channel without losing the character that made the marketplace listing work.
What was actually wrong
Going direct meant becoming a brand rather than a listing, and the only assets they had were a logo drawn once in 2019 and product photography shot to a marketplace template. There was also a real risk of building a store nobody visited, so the channel had to launch with an audience already pointed at it.
How we worked
- 01
Found the story in the roast notes
The identity came out of how they already wrote about coffee, which was specific and unfussy. We built the palette, the type and the packaging system around that voice rather than inventing a new one.
- 02
Built the store around the subscription
One-off bags convert once. The store leads with the subscription, with the flexibility to skip and swap that stops people cancelling instead of pausing.
- 03
Warmed the channel before launch
Eight weeks of content and a pre-launch list meant opening day had an audience, rather than a store waiting for search to find it.
- 04
Kept the marketplace running
Nothing was switched off. The marketplace became the top of the funnel and the direct channel took the repeat customers, which is where the margin is.
What changed
Direct now carries the majority of repeat orders, at a materially better margin than the marketplace ever allowed, and the brand finally looks like the coffee tastes.
“We thought we needed a website. What we actually needed was to own the relationship, and the site was the last part of that.”
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