Welcome to this month’s Unfiltered.
The biggest focus this month has been pricing. Not the most exciting topic, I know - but a really important one. At the heart of it all is making sure we stay sustainable as a business while still keeping things fair for you.
A while ago, we made the call to offer free shipping on every coffee order. When we first tested it, demand shot up... clearly, you all loved it. The problem was that for smaller and cheaper coffee orders, we were losing money on each shipment.
To fix that, we increased prices slightly for those smaller units. But this created another challenge - it made us too expensive for anyone wanting to buy a few kilos of different coffees. That’s when we introduced the bundle builder, where three or more 0.5kg or 1kg coffees activated a 20% discount.
That helped, but after running it for a few months, we gathered enough data to tweak things again. On average, most of you were buying six or more coffees per order - which meant we were saving quite a bit on shipping and packaging, while you were helping us reduce waste. With that insight, we realised we could create even better savings for smaller quantities too. For lower-value orders with our most affordable coffees though, we were still often taking a hit.
So we’ve made a small but important change:
- 3 coffees = 15% off
- 5 coffees = 20% off
- +7 coffees = 25% off
It’s a simple tweak, but one that makes a big difference. It protects us financially while rewarding those of you who like to stock up in one go (which also means fewer boxes going out, a small win for the environment too).
Based on the data I analysed, most of you will actually be making a greater saving with this new structure, which is something I’m really driven by; getting the coffees we offer to be as accessible as possible.
We’ve also decided to drop the 2kg option. It had a built-in saving, but didn’t make much sense alongside the new bundle structure. Those who used it can still get a similar per-kg price by ordering through the 5kg or through multi-unit bundle options.
The foundation of our approach to pricing is to be upfront with the price you're going to pay from the offset which means offering Free Shipping, something that we appreciate on a personal-consumer level, however, I’d love to get your thoughts on all this. It’s something we really value offering, but it’s also one of our biggest costs.
A few website improvements
You might also notice some updates to the site. The coffee listing pages have had a bit of an overhaul - they’re now clearer, faster, and more transparent. You’ll see our guarantees up front and a new pricing table that shows how discounts scale as you buy more. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, just making pricing easier to understand at a glance.
This table now also reflects what we actually have in stock for each variant, which ties in neatly with our new inventory management system all part of making things smoother and more accurate for you
.
I'm fully prepared for some hiccu
ps with the new approach, so expect to see some insights and updates over the next couple months.
New Resource Centre
A small but exciting project: we’ve started testing a new Resource Centre on the site. It’s where we’ll share practical guides, insights, and tools for anyone interested in learning more about green coffee and roasting. We’ve already added a few pieces and plan to keep building it out over time.
The idea is to fill it with genuinely useful content you can use day-to-day as a coffee roaster. From a commercial perspective, it also helps more people discover who we are and hopefully, one day, become part of our community. If you know someone who’d find the content interesting, please share the Resource Centre link with them. And if there’s anything you’d love to see us cover, or if you’d like to collaborate, just hit reply. We’d love to hear your ideas.
This is kind of a big bet for us, each resource we create takes considerable time researching and formatting so the hope here is for a reasonable payoff in terms of visibility with new potential customers.
Heads up; why we’re not doing Black Friday / Cyber Monday
We’ve decided not to take part in Black Friday or Cyber Monday this year.
When I reflected on it, the occasion just doesn’t really align with our values as an organisation. I spend a lot of time figuring out how to offer as much value as possible with the coffees we source and the way we price them - and jumping on a buying spree with short-term discounts or pricing gimmicks doesn’t sit well with how we want to do things.
That said, this isn’t a dig at others who do take part, we’ll probably take advantage of a few deals ourselves! But for what we offer, we’re committed to keeping pricing consistent and fair year-round, rather than dropping it for a week.
In short: no flashy discounts, just good coffee, priced as honestly as we can make it.
