Caffeinated Commerce: Subscription Club for Curated Coffee

It seems that everywhere you look in e-commerce right now, there’s a ‘box biz’ sprouting up – online subscription clubs delivering a curated box of goodies to your door every month. We covered Candy Japan earlier in the week, and listed a host of box biz outfits last month, and now Springwise is showcasing the launch of another  new box biz – eightpointnine.com – a UK based start-up running an online subscription club for coffee – allowing you to personalise the coffee blend that gets delivered to your door (click here for accompanying start-up blog). In the US, CraftCoffee.com is a Brooklyn based business running a similar subscription service, for coffee discovery rather than personalisation.

Both are crying out for a little more social love – a Facebook store, sign-on, page or group with reviews, referrals, reactions – to make them a little more, well, club-like, but that’s nothing a good FB strategy couldn’t solve.  We’d be taking a long hard look at Nestle’s Nespresso too, the poster child coffee club, exercise in victorious vertical integration ($3.9bn sales and growing 30%+ every year over the last decade), and proof that subscription clubs are big business for big brands. Coffee equipment and coffee merchandise anyone? And then we’d look at Turntable Kitchen for concept extension possibilities – Turntable kitchen is yet *another* new subscription club, pairing music and food – why not pair food and or music with coffee – caffeinated music and coffee-related/paired recipes.  Everything for your inner barista.

So who owns the box biz in your category? And if you’re lucky enough to be in an industry where subscription club players are only just emerging, shouldn’t you be thinking of one? It might be the solution for caffeinating your social and e-commerce strategies.

Nespresso, the $3.9 billion dollar club