Under The Hood: Sierra from Brewbike

Brewbike sells cold-brew coffee, primarily on university campuses but also via their D2C channel. Baked into their model, is a way to promote entrepreneurship at the student level. Once Brewbike “lands” in a new campus, the market manager hires a student CEO, COO, CPO and CMO to run the operation. Sierra joined as the CMO of Brewbike in 2020, she’s now the CEO. 

Welcome Sierra! I want to start at the beginning: How did you get involved with Brewbike?

Hey Tim! So Brewbike was founded in 2015 by a group of Northwestern students. They were solving their own problem: They built a bike that sold cold brew. The product was delicious, the delivery cycle was super quick and the experience was great overall. 

What the 4 Northwestern students found was that students loved to serve their peers, and students loved to support other students. That’s how this really cool grassroot energy built up around the bike. 

I joined in 2020 as CMO. Brewbike actually found me; I had heard of them before, and had seen them on the UT campus. I loved the mission and when they reached out, they offered me the CMO role to launch the direct-to-consumer channel. It was a no-brainer for me. 

In terms of timing - COVID had just hit. And prior to that, Brewbike was really a retail / campus first business. But once the campuses shut down, we launched DTC in 2 weeks. So that was my priority #1, to grow & expand DTC in these tough times. 

Since then, I took on more responsibilities and now run Brewbike as CEO, we have a strong DTC foothold, and are now back on campuses! We’ve grown from 11 to 21 schools for this upcoming school year - it’s been an amazing journey!

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 Amazing story. Congratulations! So tell me: How do you actually “grow” your university accounts: What does that actually look like? 

So on campuses, we essentially have 4 retail units:

• A bike
• A bar
• A coffee shop
• A market. 

The bike is the Cold Brewbike. The bar is a prefabricated indoor modular unit that requires no construction; those can live in lobbies of the business school or a dorm hall for example.  The shop is a traditional coffee shop, and the market is an app based corner store; it has a digital storefront, you buy goods from the app and pick them up at a service hub.

So we go to schools, and we find their “Dining director”, and we pitch them for 6-9 months on our different retail units. Oftentimes, existing students are the ones making the introductions to the Dining Directors. Once we’re in - we usually start with 1-2 units, and eventually expand. 

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Tell me about life as the CEO of Brewbike. What are your main responsibilities now?

I'm hyper focused on growing from 11 to 20,30, 75 and eventually 300 schools. So it's a lot of team management and managing our operations heavy organization. We’re also raising our series A, so that's where a lot of my time is spent too. 

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Exciting! On the series A front: What’s the pitch? 

It’s the same vision, but accelerated. There's so much opportunity for us to expand with campuses reopening - And that takes money. We have schools begging for us to launch on campus. We just need money to be able to do it. 

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And which types of investors are you looking at? Traditional consumer VC? PE folks?

We’d like to partner with a Tier 1 consumer VC fund. We’ve raised from PE, high-net worth individuals and angels in the past, and they’ll likely participate in our round - but for now, we’re looking for a tier once VC lead. 

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Let's talk about DTC. What are your secrets? What have you unlocked on that front? 

Well first - we developed a product that would work well for at-home consumption. We developed “Brew Bags”. You put them in a mason jar, fill it with water, steep it in the refrigerator overnight, and then you have a cold brew in the morning. The product tastes good, and is really easy. 

After that, we realized that we can leverage direct-to-consumer to extend our LTV on campus. We acquire customers IRL on campus, and before they graduate we try to convert them to online purchasers via D2C. That’s been the biggest “unlock” in terms of strategy on our side.  

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Do you experiment with business models on the DTC side? Is there a subscription? Clever bundling? 

We've tested all of it and we’ve landed on what we call “Perks”. That’s our subscription model. The customer can choose their frequency of delivery,  choose new flavors, skip easily. We have simple texting modifications built-in - it’s really easy for the customer. Beyond that, we bundle quite a bit, typically when we’re trying to move certain products faster. We'll do that more than discounting. 

The best thing though is our mini, sample packs. They’ve been super popular, and we’ve also run some successful paid acquisition campaigns around them - giving people a free mini to try and converting them into high LTV customers.

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Tell me more about paid acquisition: Do you invest in it? Or are you more reliant on word-of-mouth via campuses? 

When we launched direct-to-consumer, we were spending heavily on paid media. At the start of the pandemic, there was a real rush to put tons of money into Facebook & Google, and then iOS 14 happened which slowed everything down. We weren’t getting the ROAS that we were getting before. And it no longer made sense to us. 

Since then we’ve really evolved in how we think about the transition from campus / retail to DTC and now we’re primarily focused on refining that path to longer DTC LTV. 

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Let's talk about the tech stack. What’s powering your business? 

We use a tone of SMS. And that’s all powered by Attentive. We get a lot of great data from that channel, and it really enables us to connect to our customers. I’m a huge fan of Klaviyo which we use for email marketing. 

And then we use Repeat for SMS replenishment texts. Disco for the post purchase network. Recharge is what is powering our subscriptions. Delighted NPS is what we use for NPS surveys. Gorgias for Customer Support. Glew for the eCommerce analytics dashboard. Sanity as a CMS. Unbounce for landing pages. ARPU for upcoming charge emails to subscribers and Dear for inventory management.

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Can you tell me more about Glew and Dear? 

I can't speak highly enough about Glew. It has been a game changer for us. We don't have a data analyst on the team. When we started using Glew, we were super small and it was a very easy solution for us to implement - we would not have a dashboard if it weren’t for them. 

Just a quick one: What are the 2-3 metrics you love Glew for? Does it connect to campuses for omni-channel performance? 

I'm deep in LTV right now. That's what I'm checking every single day. But you can configure the data to measure whatever you want. It's so intuitive. From an omnichannel standpoint - it does connect to some campuses. Many schools use their own POS which makes it hard for us to extract the data  - but we do capture some campus data within our dashboards. 

What about Dear? 

I don't spend my days in Dear, our head of operations does. So I can't speak to it as much. But we use it to track inventory across our 3PL and co-packer as well as the shipments that go in and out of our direct-to-consumer business. 
One last question for me: What would you attribute most of your success to? 

The world's best team: It’s hands down, no questions asked what makes Brewbike successful. Everybody on this team is an A-player and they're all very passionate about the mission. We would not be here without the team; the exact team we have in place. 

Sierra! Thank you so much for all the insights! Good luck on the Series A! You’re gonna crush it!!! Go go go Brewbike!