Online Marketplace Brandroll Drums Up Appreciation for Smaller Roasters

The Brandroll online store, featuring coffees from numerous specialty coffee roasters (screenshot). All images courtesy of Brandroll.

An online multiroaster coffee seller and subscription platform called Brandroll recently launched, focusing on high-quality specialty coffees and the brands behind them. 

Brandroll promises a targeted platform for small and emerging coffee companies to cut through the noise of the internet and social media to sell more of their conscientiously crafted products.

“”[It’s] not just a place where you can purchase great coffee; it’s a place where you can discover great brands,” Brandroll Founder Eric Park recently told Daily Coffee News. “There are lots of great roasters out there — too many to count, really… It’s important to offer great products, but it’s equally important for us to offer products that come from great brands — brands that possess strong identities and compelling narratives that people can identify with.”

Brandroll Founder Eric Park.

With a background in the tech industry, New York City-based Park launched Brandroll as an adtech startup in 2021, before ultimately narrowing the focus to specialty coffee. 

“The company does have a larger vision to offer products from verticals beyond specialty coffee,” said Park. “So the phrase ‘Brandroll’ can also be understood in the context of that larger vision, although we are focused on specialty coffee for now.”

While reaching out to roasters whose coffees he enjoyed, Park arranged for discounts for the company’s newsletter subscribers. Brandroll generates its own revenue through sales on the marketplace and through affiliate links. 

The Brandroll homepage (screenshot).

Descriptions of coffees on the site are notably concise, while the newsletter showcases roasting brands and the people behind them through extensive interviews, profiles and photo collections maintained by Brandroll. 

“When I was starting out with no previous exposure to specialty coffee, I found many of the descriptions out there to be inaccessible and overly technical, so that experience probably had some impact on the way I approach copywriting for the marketplace,” said Park. “I had never written copy for e-commerce before, let alone for specialty coffee, so it’s been a learning process. I don’t look to other coffee websites for inspiration. I look to my own intuition and write what makes sense to me.”

Through the newsletter subscription, Brandroll now reaches a nationwide audience of coffee consumers.

“The newsletter has helped us expand our reach,” said Park. “At the same time, we’ve also learned that there is greater appetite for this type of content — content that helps consumers get closer to brands and find greater appreciation for their work.”

An offering from Oval Coffee Roasters, as seen on Brandroll.

Brandroll is also launching a B2B subscription platform in New York City, with plans to expand to additional markets. Brandroll hopes to act as a wholesale intermediary, offering offices and other accounts a rotation of specialty coffee from a curated list of local roasters. Clients will be able to select the quantity, the selection (blends vs. single-origin coffees, or both) and the frequency of delivery.

“The service will probably make more sense to organizations that care about office culture and employee engagement,” said Park. “Our mission is to get more people to drink great coffee, and we think that selling to businesses is the best way to do that.”

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