Spotlight on: Fellow
"It's not rocket science; it's coffee."
Jake Miller, Founder and CEO of Fellow, is on a singular mission to help people brew ridiculously good coffee at home. Fellow is a product design company based in San Francisco focused on delivering coffee gear to elevate the home brewing process. Their products include the award-winning Stagg EKG Electric Pour-over Kettle, the Atmos Vacuum Canister, and the Prismo for Aeropress.
Jake is a true entrepreneur and marketer at heart: passionate and determined with a keen eye for identifying opportunities in the market. When working here in Minnesota at Caribou, he fell in love with specialty coffee and product design. He also saw a gap in the outdated equipment people were using to brew that specialty coffee. A few years later, he started Fellow coffee products as a startup out of the Stanford d.school in 2013.
Because Jake didn’t have an engineering or product development background, he relied on the human-centered design approach to get as close to his customers as possible. As such, he didn’t throw money at big market studies or research. He went directly to his source: Coffee lovers. “We found people who loved specialty coffee,” Jake says, “And spent a lot of time with them.” This included watching said coffee lovers brew coffee and use Fellow products.
He didn’t want to overcomplicate things for Fellow, noting “It’s not rocket science, it’s coffee.”
Relationships, Not Transactions
Fellow has gone from d.school startup to Kickstarter campaign to Shopify to rapid growth on a global scale. Their product portfolio has expanded along with operations. But Jake is careful to never stray from the company’s mission of elevating the coffee brewing experience to keep solutions grounded. Every challenge or opportunity gets funneled through this filter. In this light, digital is another tool Jake and his team creatively mold to deepen direct, value-add relationships with customers.
One recent example of Fellow’s digital innovation is their Fellow Drops text-to-order coffee program. In it, customers can send a text to order roasted coffee beans to their door, beans that are hand-selected by Fellow’s expert panel of tasters. Fellow keeps their marketing conversational and views digital content to connect and educate customers on using their products. They continue to remind themselves that the goal isn’t just driving transactions; it’s serving the actual people who are clicking on links and moving through the online shopping process. Go with what makes the best organic connection, even if competitors view it as a traditional tactic. Old can become new again. Jake adds, “By the way, direct mailers are cool again.”
In the Key of D Podcast
Did you know Jake and Creatis President Kathy Hollenhorst go way back as colleagues? Kathy hired Jake as a Brand Manager to her team at Caribou in 2008, where podcast co-host Gino Giovannelli also worked at the same time. This long-brewing relationship has come full circle. Jake Miller recently joined our In the Key of D Podcast to talk more in-depth about the origins of Fellow, entrepreneurship, piloting Fellow through a pandemic, and leveraging digital marketing. Listen to his podcast episode, “Stand It Up, See What Happens,” here. [ADD LINK]
Learn more about Fellow.
