How a Small LA Coffee Shop’s Cup Sleeves Became the Go-To Marketing Vehicle for Billion-Dollar Brands
The story of Alfred Coffee and its trendy rings of cardboard
Six years ago, a staffer from Kelly Wearstler’s studio stopped by Alfred Coffee in West Hollywood to fetch a bunch of cappuccinos and vanilla lattes for the office. This was nothing especially out of the ordinary, since the indie coffee shop and the headquarters of the acclaimed furniture and interior designer were just a few blocks apart. Besides, even on a bad day, L.A. has no shortage of trendy people walking around.
But when the staffer casually asked if the shop might be in need of any design services, owner Josh Zad perked up. While Zad takes pride in handling the interior design for his stores on his own, he did have a project in mind that, if the design was right, he hoped would turn into a thing: the sleeves of his coffee cups.
“It was the moment we were waiting for,” Zad recalled, “because I needed somebody with a name, a presence and, of course, style, to really unlock the element of creating custom coffee sleeves.”
The name Alfred Coffee is an homage to Alfred, millionaire Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler from the 1960s Batman TV series. Accordingly, Zad had already decorated his cup sleeves with four stylized mustache illustrations. They were a clever, simple riff on the brand name that had also started to rouse the kind of curiosity that fuels word-of-mouth marketing. But Zad’s collaboration with Wearstler gave him something else—not just a cool design, but a partner brand with its own cachet.
“We worked with her team and we launched the Kelly Wearstler sleeves, and from there, it’s snowballed,” Zad said, “unlocking the potential of coffee sleeves.”
A band of cardboard that keeps customers from burning their fingertips? What sort of potential lay in that? More than one might think, actually.
Zad had long suspected that the humble coffee sleeve had more going for it than heat insulation. What if he could launch eye-catching designs and change them every month? And what if, down the road, he could sell space on the sleeves to other brands?
These days, Zad lays claim to being the first entrepreneur to turn the humble coffee sleeve into a functional billboard. His coffee cup sleeves have hosted companies ranging from apps like Bumble and Postmates to tony apparel makers like premium denim brand Paige and Lunya sleepwear. He’s even done partnerships with truly huge names including American Airlines, CBS, Nike and Disney.
Zad, who cut his teeth in real estate before going into the restaurant business, likens his coffee sleeves to billboards you can get people to carry around for you. “One of the most coveted prizes in real estate is property that had a billboard,” he said. “So I really had always had my eye towards unlocking this sort of billboard for the cafes when we launched.”
Seen on Melrose Place
Alfred Coffee isn’t a huge operation. Apart from an outpost in Austin, Texas, plus several Japanese locations of a sister concept devoted to tea, Alfred counts eight units in Tinseltown. Compare that to 137 outlets for Starbucks, plus any number of indie shops.
Yet not long after opening his first store on Melrose Place in 2013, Zad began making a name for himself. The coffee was good, sure, but the café itself immediately captured the neighborhood’s vibe. Soon, influencers and a few genuine celebrities began to haunt the café’s tables. Alfred’s white-tiled fireplace, trophy antlers, and floral wallpaper made the place Instagrammable (a term Zad claims he “basically” coined) and the café’s slogan—“But first, coffee”—found its way into the L.A. vernacular. The success of the first shop gradually led to more and, by 2018, CNN was calling him the “Beverage King of LA.”
Paper coffee cups as a marketing tool isn’t an entirely new idea. When the Mud Truck first parked on Astor Place in Manhattan 20 years ago, its orange cups became a cultural fixture of Greenwich Village. And when Dunkin’ (which positions itself as a coffee chain these days) was busy with its rebranding efforts of 2018, one of the design elements that CMO Tony Weisman paid particular attention to was the paper cups.
“We spend a lot of money, we make a lot of ads, we buy a lot of media,” Weisman told Adweek. “But the cup is the most important asset we have because it’s the most personal.”
But the concept of using coffee sleeves as a marketing vehicle was new—in part because coffee sleeves themselves are new. A realtor named Jay Sorenson invented them in 1991, patenting them as the Java Jacket. By renting space on his cup sleeves to other brands, Zad is betting that Alfred Coffee’s popularity is such that they’ll be willing to not only develop their own sleeve designs but pay him to give them to his customers. Monthly partnerships run in the high five figures—and sometimes into six figures—depending on how many locations Zad will mobilize for the effort.
The sleeve program, then, is an alternate revenue steam for Alfred and also an opportunity to associate his own business with similarly cool brands out in the world.
Take me home with you
So what’s in it for those brands? And why would the likes of Disney or Nike—companies that spend billions on advertising—want to partner with a small coffee chain?
Obviously, the advantage is to be seen around a town like L.A. and held in the hands of socially active consumers in the 25-35 age bracket—“the primetime demographic for spending, for reading, for being vocal,” Zad said, meaning that Alfred’s sleeves get noticed on the sidewalk and on social media feeds. In view of these forces, a company that makes, say, multivitamins for seniors may not want to inquire with Alfred Coffee.
But many others do. “We partner with brands across apparel, apps and television,” Zad said, “and they work towards creating a message maybe for a new television show, maybe for a charitable effort, maybe for just a feel-good message, maybe to drive traffic back to their website, depending on the brand.”
For instance, in 2020 CBS booked its third year with Alfred to promote “For Your Consideration,” its app aimed at Television Academy and Guild members to watch screeners. “What captured their attention and made them do it is they know that the Emmy voters they’re concentrating on [are] between my Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Silver Lake and West Hollywood stores,” Zad said, so “they’re capturing that audience getting their coffee every day. Which is a very different approach than just a billboard or a page in Variety magazine.”
Zad doesn’t promise a set number of people on the street will take note of the brand on one of his coffee sleeves; measuring those kinds of impressions is not as easy as measuring clicks. But with 120,000 sleeves sent out into the city during a one-month sponsorship—and with the average customer in eyeshot of scores of people in the course of their sipping—the exposure pretty much explains itself.
This June, when Kylie, the cosmetics brand founded by Kylie Jenner, signed on for the coffee sleeve program, it yielded over 6.3 million impressions over the course of the month, and social engagements reached some 109,000.
A win-win?
It seems like such a simple idea, yet some potential risks lie in the matchmaking. Zad is careful not to host competing brands on his coffee sleeves. He’s also wary of being “too corporate” in the partners he selects, since his shops do have a modish reputation to uphold.
“Part of the challenge for us is balancing these brands,” Zad said. “If Netflix came and said, ‘We want the sleeves for an entire year,’ while that would be enticing, it would not be to our benefit [for] someone to come to our coffee shop every day, four or five times a week, and getting Netflix pounded into their heads.”
Veteran marketing consultant Deb Gabor, founder of Sol Marketing, said the same standard of review applies for a coffee-sleeve deal as in any brand partnership.
“You want to make sure you look at it through the lens of your vision, your values, your mission and who your ideal customer is.”
That advisory aside, Gabor believes Zad’s program not only makes sense but has wider potential for similar coffee retailers, too.
“It’s an alternative revenue stream for a coffee chain to use available real estate to elevate its brand through highlighting other brands—so they’re getting the benefit of brand association, and they’re also selling it to these brands,” she said. “Marketers today are looking for novel ways to get people’s attention and accelerate the process of forming an image and forging bonds.”
What’s more, Gabor added, it’s an idea that seems uniquely suited for the coronavirus period. “I like these analog things at a time when, for many people, the daily coffee is the only indulgence you get from staring at your screen and your Zoom meeting and being a teacher at home,” she said.
Meanwhile, even though the pandemic has put the kibosh on many Halloween festivities this year, Alfred Coffee is still ready with a timely sleeve, care of Freeform. The cable TV channel is currently running a scary-movie lineup called 31 Days of Halloween, which owner Disney is promoting via an Alfred Coffee sleeve. It’s jet black and features a set of Dracula fangs along with the tagline “Vampires suck. So do mornings.”