Ever wonder why you’ll reach for one beverage brand over another? Why some are all-stars and others struggle? On this 142nd episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Chris Gallant, CEO of Chamberlain Coffee. In this episode, we’ll dive into the current landscape of the beverage industry, and discover where digital marketing really makes a difference.

From making sense of attribution when you’re in-store and online, to competing in a saturated industry (hint: take some notes on Chamberlain’s branding) we reveal what most beverage companies miss. If you’re in the beverage industry and want to hear from a seasoned professional who’s worked alongside brands such as Red Bull and Heineken, this one's for you.Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Inside the Beverage Industry with Chamberlain Coffee

Andrew Maff and Chris Gallant 

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Chris Gallant 

Chris Gallant is CEO of Chamberlain Coffee. A highly experienced executive with more than 15 years of tenure in the beverage industry, Chris has led growth at world class brands like Red Bull and Heineken, and launched, grown, and led multiple new, exciting premium brands in the space. During his tenure at Chamberlain Coffee, Chris has overseen the explosive growth of the much-talked about brand, executing countless new product launches, entrance into new categories, collaborations and retail expansion.

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I think that the biggest misunderstanding getting into it is just, you know, the amount of time and the amount of money takes to launch a brand, Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Chris Gallant, who is the CEO of Chamberlain Coffee. Chris, how you doing? Man, you're ready for you? Ready for a good show? Awesome start. I am. Let's do it. Beautiful. Super excited to have you on the show. I'm a big coffee fan. I also know your background is nuts, so I do want to get into that as well. So obviously, I always like to let you do the honors of that started off the stereotypical way. Tell us a little bit about your background. You know where you were at. We'll get into chamber and coffee next. Yeah, my background is beverages. I love drinks, and so I've been in the beverage world since about 2009 have worked for some large companies like Heineken and Red Bull strategy and m&a teams. Started a brewery in New York and sold it. Worked in kobucha for a while, and now I'm here. So, you know, I've, I've been, I've been in beverages for most of my career, whether consulting for them or working for them or leading them. So having a lot of fun now selling coffee. So beverages in all of the CBG space, food and beverages are a pain, like they can be really tough to get going. And you've now worked with, as you mentioned, I know it was Heineken Red Bull. You had the brewery kombucha. Now you've gotten into coffee, which is a very different direction out of those. But what a like? What kind of got you into the industry in the first place? Yeah, I for sure. I wish I knew how hard it was before I chose this path. You know, it's, it's it's difficult, it's competitive and it's very expensive. But what got me into it? Let's see, I I was consulting for for a large consulting firm in the US. Had an opportunity to go work for a beverage company traveling around the Caribbean, helping them assess their operations in different islands. So I jumped on the opportunity to do that project, fell in love and took it up from there. Wow, the so obviously you alluded to and as I did as well, the beverage space is just it's very difficult. There's a ton of beverages that are launched all the time and then fail all the time. You've obviously had experience in a lot of different name brand beverages and Chamberlain coffees, obviously growing like a weed right now. So like, what do you see as the big mistake that a lot of these different beverage companies make when they first go to launch? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, there's so many mistakes to be made, and I've made most of them myself. I mean, there's, I think understanding what it takes to to build the companies overall is the hardest thing, right? So it takes time, and it takes a lot of investment upfront, even if you are co packing or making it with another manufacturer. Takes investment to develop a product, to buy all the inventory, the raw materials, to hold that inventory, and then to to get it on shelf right. It costs money to get a product on shelf, and it costs money to get the product to come off shelf right, especially if you're a new brand without brand awareness, you've just got to invest so much behind trade spend, and if we're talking about retail, you're going to invest a lot of money behind promos to get people to sample your product, because if you're just a new product on shelf and no one's heard of you, no one's going to take you, maybe, unless you're on deal, or unless you're visible with an off shelf display, so they can try you, and then they'll come back and keep buying you if you're great. But you've got to get that first purchase. And if you're talking about e com Again, you've got to spend money behind, you know, paid media. You've got to spend money behind, building a social presence to get people to be aware of you. So, yeah, I think that the biggest misunderstanding getting into it is just, you know, the amount of time and the amount of money takes to launch a brand. Let's talk about the E com. So. Side for a second, because that side's always very interesting. You know, we've worked with a ton of beverage brands that, you know, they're coming straight out the gate. They want to get started and get things moving. And I know that the difficulty, especially with anything in CBG, is just, you've got to get someone to try something. But for beverage, it's so expensive to ship because you've got to, you know, basically sell them at least like a 12 pack or something like that, to actually get them to make that purchase. So what do you do in the beginning stages to get people to actually try things over the internet before they actually commit to a larger order? Or are you solely relying on the promos in store? Great question. We actually didn't come up with a beverage until three years into the business. So we started out with coffee to dry coffee, bags of coffee or tinted to matcha and and, and we still don't sell beverages online for just that reason. I think it's, it's really, you're right, you you've got to, when you're selling beverages, you've got to sell a multi pack, preferably at least a 12 pack to make the economics work. Now, the challenge with that is, you're asking people to spend, you know, 30 to $40 maybe more, and that's a high rank for somebody to sample something, for someone who's never tried something, you know, 30 to $40 potentially plus shipping, is is a lot of money to spend if you've never tried or have even heard of a brand. Yeah. And so now that we, now that we do have the brand awareness, we're going to be bringing some of our beverages online. But it's it's taken us to we launched beverages little over a year ago. Taken us a year to get there? Yeah? Now, so for the coffee side specifically, I know it can be a little bit different, right? But the coffee side is so wildly competitive, everyone and their mother likes to just go find beans and slap a label on it and then say that they have their own coffee brand. And that is a nightmare scenario, because it's just another me too, product coffee, I understand a little bit different because the economics of it still line up. The shipping doesn't have to be as crazy as if you were selling a 12 pack or something, but still, it's that beginning, like, how do you get people to actually try the coffee? Did you start off with, like, smaller, like, samplers that were just, like, you know, kind of free plus shipping kind of thing? Or what was that initial approach? Yeah. I mean, look, we have a head start because, because my partner has such a loud voice online, right? She she started as a YouTuber, has an amazing podcast, so we had a bit of a head start to make people aware of our brand and get them to sample it. But you're right. It's, you know, it's, it's hard to get people to try things. And so you want to balance out having a product that is at a low enough cost, you know, per unit, price per unit so that people are willing to say, oh, I can try this for 10 or $20 but that's also enough to to cover your economics over time. Yeah, right. And so that's, you know, one of the great things about coffee is it comes into that price point. You know, we charge about $16 a bag. And so that's, that's not a big ring for consumers to try a new product now shipping out a bag of coffee. That's, you know, if we're just shipping one bag, right? That that economics, those economics don't work, and so we have to try to get them through incentives, or through bundles, or through, you know, through add ons to, instead of buying a bag of coffee a month by, you know, a bag of coffee and a mug and Tina Macha, and then two months later, come back and buy something else. Yeah, so you brought up your partner, which I did want to ask you about. So Emma Chamberlain, obviously the namesake of the brand. One thing I've noticed about your brand, specifically, when I've, you know, seen a lot of brands that have an influencer tied to them, and most of the time, the influencers face is, like, stapled all over the website, and you guys went in a different direction with that. I think from what I was able to find Emma's only referenced, like in a couple sentences, like in your about section, kind of thing. So what was the thought process around leveraging her influence but not catering to it with the brand? Yeah, it's a great question. I think so obviously the brand is her namesake, so it's, it's intimately tied to her brand as well. Yeah. But you know, what we see is a lot of a lot of creators, a lot of celebrities, promoting brands a little bit too much, maybe not a little bit a lot too much. And I think that leads to this inauthenticity that, over time, consumers, you know, won't believe them as much as they're promoting things. Won't believe that, you know, celebrity, a really does believe in this product that he or she probably doesn't use, right? Yeah. And so we, you know, we really want the brand to feel authentic to Emma, because ultimately, she isn't just a face our brain. She's the founder of our brand. She's a board member. She's one of the key day to day players in it, right? And so we take a pretty deliberate role with her about how much should we promote this? You know, it. Probably shouldn't be every day, maybe not even every week. Now, on our own page, we're promoting the heck out of it, but you know, for her, we want to make sure it still feels authentic to consumers, yeah, for so and you know, kind of to that point, like, I know, like influencers, their reach can only get you so far, and then at a certain point, you kind of hit a wall of, okay, we've either more or less gotten to all of the people that you have an influence on, or, you know, we're just kind of hitting a wall with who we can contact. So in your scenario, in terms of marketing outside of leveraging her brand, what has that been like? I know there's a lot going on on an E commerce, like online perspective, I know you're also leaning heavier into the retail side of things. So like, what's that whole approach been? Yeah, I think, I think any celebrity can get you that first look, right, or their first sample. People will go try it. But beyond that, you've got to, to get those people coming back. You've got to have a great product to have them keep coming back to buy your product again. If you look at, you know, our our sales and E comm every day, a big chunk of it is returning consumers, the people coming back to buy again, again. I think the other thing is, you know, celebrities don't reach every person in the US, and so you've got to create a brand that can stand on its own as well. And so we try to create a fun, unique, different brand, or their own brand voice that speaks to consumers. So if you go down the coffee aisle at retail, right, you'll see lots of brown and drab colors, and you see our bright pink and purple packaging. And it's something else. It's, it's sort of jumping out to consumers. So that's part of it is creating its own brand, and part of it is, you know, we've, we've got to do all the nuts and bolts that any brand that that doesn't have a celebrity on it, right? So we've got to spend money on paid media, right? We've got to work with micro influencers at retail. We have to do price promotions to get people that have never heard of us or Emma to try the product. We've got to do, you know, shelf talkers put up piece, you know, big cardboard stand. So we've got to do it all as well. Yeah, are you kind of, because, to your point, most of E commerce seems to be from returning customers. So are you kind of using retail as like a customer acquisition channel and trying to get them to come back to E com? Or are you kind of doing a blend of the two? It's actually the other way around, right? Because as you, as you look at, and this is the hard part about e commerce, right, on a gross margin basis, e commerce is a much more profitable channel for us, right? Then, then retailers. But if you start to look on a fully loaded contribution margin basis, and start to look at the cost of acquiring consumers, the cost of shipping product retail starts to become much more profitable channel, and there's much, much more volume there. And so as we push more into retail, we start to look at E commerce as something special for our consumers. So a point we can interact with them, a point we can talk with the consumers that really want to engage with our brand and a discovery tool, right? And then retail is a real growth engine for our business. Interesting. So it's a very interesting way to look at that. So, so if you're looking at the E commerce side as the customer acquisition channel, trying to kind of focus on hey, you know we're available in retail from your paid media perspective, are you keeping that focused in areas only where you're available in retail, or are you doing like a full nationwide and just check out your local, local store kind of thing? Yeah. So, I mean, we're in a bunch of nationwide retailers, so we really, we push it. I think what's the stat? It's like 90 something percent of America lives within five miles of a Walmart, right? And we're in all the Walmart so we, you know, we really push it pretty, pretty nationwide, and we're starting to do a mix of ads, and we're starting to experiment with, what does it look like as we maybe do an ad that's not focused on bringing somebody to our, our own dBc site, but directing that paid media to to Instacart and one of our, one of our partners, right? Or maybe to Amazon, because a lot of people use Amazon as a, you know, replacement for the grocery store. So we're starting to experiment with that looks like that, you know, really messes with what our, you know, ours and our cat figures look like over time, because all of a sudden, we're spending ads and directing people away from our site, yeah, but I think ultimately it's healthy for the business and so, okay, so you're also available on Amazon. We are, yes, interesting. Okay, so you're so, yeah, so that actually, then that brings up a great question, if you're adjusting paid media to potentially go to one of those channels where you can't measure attribution, and you also have a lot of people that you know there's bleed over and they're going to retail. How do you put together your target KPIs for things like paid media or any of your marketing initiatives from an E commerce perspective, knowing that it's going to have an effect, from an off website perspective as well? As probably your Amazon or Instacart or Walmart, etc. That's a great question I was going to ask you the same thing. I mean, I think a lot of other people you know that are running brands that went from D to C into retail, and it's a pretty common thing, right? Especially for brands that started during covid 19, such an uplift from the massive, the massive Off, off trend uptick right during E commerce or covid. But, you know, taking their brand now to retail to really grow it, how do they measure that success? And I don't think anyone has found a great measure yet of saying, like, okay, now I take 15% of my budget and I direct that towards retail. It's really hard to measure. You can start to try it by doing it on a geography basis. And I've got, you know, X chain in the pack Northwest, and I'll just, you know, pump a bunch of paid media in the pack northwest to see if there's an uplift. And you can start to do some of that. But it's really hard to measure the impact of of online digital media against, yeah, against offline sales. It's always comforting to me when I asked that question to a business that's run like yours, and you're like, I don't, I don't know, like, good, okay, just making sure that it's not just me. I do feel like we're working on it. We're trying to figure it out, but it's really, it's really hard to measure. I mean, there's, there's, obviously, we know there's some impact, right? Because we know that, you know, just functionally people see an ad online, that doesn't just mean they buy something online, it will impact their purchase behavior at the grocery store. And so you can try to look at an aggregate by geography, but that's kind of the only measure we've seen. So yeah, we can kind of see if it works. Nick I've felt like as time has gone on, especially as you know, attribution has gotten stripped away and things like that, like digital marketing is really becoming very similar to traditional marketing. Like you can't paint the picture of an ROI of a billboard, so like you're looking at marketing collectively. And my favorite example was actually, ironically, it was coffee. It was watching my wife's shop, she got hit from an Instagram ad. Clicked on the ad, went to their website, went from their website and searched see if they were available on Amazon, thought they looked good, wanted to see if you get a discount. Went back to the website, forgot their name, so we had to google them. Clicked on their Google ad, went to the website and converted. I was like, look from as a marketing standpoint, I hate you, like, I have no idea how to decide what worked there, and because that customer journey is so fluid now it's like, you can't really paint that picture as much as you want. It's much harder. I mean, look, when I worked at Red Bull, we built, you know, giant ice mountains in baseball Parks had downhill ice skating races, like, how do you how do you measure that cost against the success of the brand? Right? We think like and correct me, I'm wrong, but at a brand at that size, and I would imagine also at Heineken, it's really more of your focus, your marketing niches are a little bit more focused on just eyeballs and not so much actual conversion, because you kind of assume X amount of eyeballs are pretty much guaranteed to get us X amount of sales, correct? Yeah, at that measure, yes, right. You start to see what the impact is of building an ice mountain right in different, you know, in that specific geography, right? But then also right in terms of what media did you get out of that? And now you can kind of see, you know, as you put that on social media, what happens and how many eyeballs you get there? Yeah, but it's not quite as easy to see. I'm gonna run a price promotion in this chain in central Ohio, and let's see what the lift is out of it. Yeah. So I digress. Going back to Chamberlain, what do you how do you kind of position the brand like when you first started with Chamberlain, like, Did you figure out exactly how, like, where the hole in the market was, because, like I mentioned earlier, like coffee is a wildly competitive space. So how did you figure out, like, Okay, here's how we can really connect with an audience that seems to not have that representation right now. Yeah, I looked from a consumer and from a brand standpoint, a lot of it stemmed from Emma and her audience, right? And her method of communicating with fans and her voice. And so that worked really well for us. That was, that was an easy part to figure out. I think as far as products goes, it was more trial and error, right? And so it was trying to understand how our consumers want to drink coffee because it's, it's not like I'm drinking it now, right? Sort of hot coffee, black in the morning, right? They want to drink it cold. They want to drink it, you know, sweeter. They want to drink it at different occasions, throughout the day, in different formats. So, you know, it took a lot of, took a lot of work for us to say, Okay, this format works. This doesn't, you know, this type of roast works. This doesn't. This flavor profile works. This doesn't. So, you know, part of it is listening to consumers and hearing what they say. You know, sometimes what they say they want isn't always you know, what they'll actually buy. So part of it is trial and error. Part of it's looking at what other brands are doing, either in our category adjacent categories. But I. It's really triangulating all those data points, seeing what works, what about from like, a retention perspective, because, like, I said, coffee's just so competitive that it's always interesting to me to speak with someone that broke through that. But what do you do to keep them coming back? Obviously, you know, the standard audit emails and stuff like that. But like, like, how do you manage, like, reward programs or anything along those lines? Would you even have those? Yeah, we've an award program or super affiliate, which I think works really well for us. We have a subscription program with, you know, free shipping. So those things work well. It's was interesting. What's happened to our subscription program as we launch on Amazon, and as we launch at retail, so you know, as we launch in Amazon, we saw subscriptions slow down, and we saw Amazon Subscribe and Save take off like crazy, which told us, hey, there's just a cohort of consumers that prefer to shop on Amazon, so we've got to be there. We've got to offer them products here. That's their preferred method to purchase. Similarly, we launched in retail, we saw some subscriptions slow down, and the feedback we got from consumers that the subscription surveys at the end, they end at the end, it is, hey, I can now buy you at my local Walmart or my local Target, and so I'm going to buy you there instead. And so it made us really start to think about, is there something different we can offer on subscription? Is there a unique flavor? Is there something extra that those diehards that wanted delivered to them by us should get or can't get. Yeah, yeah. When I actually, when we first started the ecom show, I had the founder of bold commerce, Jay Myers, on the show, and all we did was talk about the subscription side, and the complications of getting a good subscription model in place was, it was just so eye opening is a great episode. I completely agree. As soon as am, as soon as you kind of open up the Amazon wormhole, people prefer to, you know, Subscribe and Save there. And so, you know, it's a it's a very clear lesson of diversification. Be everywhere that your customer is like in your point, you're on retail, you have your own website, you have Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, etc. So it really is a matter of just keep trucking along with what you know is working well, and then just let them shop wherever they're most comfortable. Yeah, you know, we pushed back against launching Amazon for a long time, yeah. And then once we did it, you know, we want to put a little little bit of effort behind it. It really took off. So again, they told us, hey, people want to buy there. And so, you know what? Wi Fi, if our consumer, the people that love us, want to buy in this in this manner, then let's do it. Yeah, absolutely. Chris, really appreciate it. I don't want to take up too much more of your time. It was great having you on the show. I appreciate your time. I would love to give you the opportunity here to let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Chamberlain

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coffee, great chamberlaincoffee.com or @ChamberlainCoffee on all social media.

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Easy enough. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks again. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, we'll see you all next time.

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Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.