EIGHT POINT NINE: a personalised coffee subscription service

Context

Eight Point Nine is a personalised coffee subscription service.

Customers simply describe the tastes they like and our flavour-matching algorithm figures out their perfect blend of beans. We blend by hand and ship to people’s mailbox, twice a month or more.

Launched in 2011, we were one of the first UK coffee subscription businesses – and remain a very personalised service. In the last twelve months alone, we’ve shipped over 35,000 bags of coffee.

Progress

We’ve been operating for four years, and spent much of that time testing different variants of the service. This has enabled us to optimise our proposition, build a scalable operational model and great supply chain. We’re not an unproven start-up, as we’ve been generating revenue. 

• The first couple of years were all about trialling different suppliers and propositions and developing a basic transactional website. 
• In 2014 we re-engineered our platform and fulfilment capabilities to win co-brand business. We ran national trials with potential co-brand partners, accessing thousands of households.
• 2015 has been all about scale. Our co-brand model is starting to deliver growth for the business, with our strategic partners giving us access to over 200,000 coffee drinkers every year.    

We’ve been really pleased with sales growth over the last 12 months, but we’ve barely scratched the surface. We believe that our co-brand partnerships will deliver us significant volumes of new customers. We need to invest now to maximise the opportunity and maintain our momentum.

Having self-funded the business, we plan to invest in expanding our core team beyond the founders, to continue developing our technology platform (investment in mobile, social & our flavour-matching algorithm) and to invest in customer retention & advocacy.