For the first 4-5 years of our business, I referred to myself as “Roaster Brian.” But before and after RSR started, I’ve spent a number of years working in software development. Since returning to software full-time in 2020 and making RSR my “side hustle” once again, I’ve been a Product Manager for digital products. But it was building coffee products for RSR where I consider this product-focused chapter of my career to have started. 

Specialty Coffee for Normies

The very first mission statement that I wrote for RSR was “Turning coffee drinkers into coffee lovers.” It reflected the reality of what I’d seen before I even incorporated the business: That even when I was burning coffee with a bread machine+heat gun in my garage on Ross Street in Toledo, the people I was sharing it with were 1) accustomed to drinking very recognizable big-name brands, and 2) were telling me that was I was giving them was the best coffee they’d ever had. 

It’s how I knew that, despite my very crude tools, I had something special that people were clamoring about and it kept stoking my passion and my desire to go further into the craft. 

This is starting to change now but in 2015, Specialty Coffee still had a bit of a credibility problem with coffee drinkers who hadn’t already been “converted” to the joys of Specialty Coffee. Movies parodied baristas as pretentious snobs that talked down to customers. Those kinds of jokes land because there’s a kernel of truth to them.

But our first supporters were small town folks that were my family, friends, & neighbors. I won people over with my enthusiasm for sharing what I was doing and the quality of our first products, which were entirely centered around a rotating cast of Single Origin coffees. 

From Origins to Products

To this day, I love Single Origin coffees at a light to light-medium roast level. But I understood early on that my own preferences were going to have to take a backseat to the needs of building a coffee brand. 

Being in a rural area, I decided our first signature blend product should be something that I could set down in front of an older church lady or the old guys at the gas station that stand around and talk every morning - and have them all think: “Now that’s a good cup of coffee.” How to make a Specialty Coffee blend that appealed to folk who’d spent their entire lives drinking brands that became dominant in the mid-20th century? 

Jack’s Feed Store was born out of that. A right-down-the-middle medium roast that’s named after the business that, from the 1950s to 1990s, operated where RSR has been located for the past 9+ years. 

Next, we tackled the product intended for folks whose coffee experiences were formed in the 1990s forward, where a certain celestial brand has long dominated with their intensely smokey dark roasts. Collaborating with our friends at Brewhemia in Cedar Rapids, and both of our areas being places where large numbers of Czech immigrants settled in the previous century, we released Bohemian Gothic - our signature dark roast blend that has consistently been our top-seller since shortly after its release. 

Learning from failures 

Part of the art of product management is knowing when to end the life of products, some of which you may personally love. Carrying too many products in a catalog/portfolio can create too much overhead in the operation that doesn’t get “paid for” by value returned to the business.

To refine our product offerings for either market effectiveness and/or operational efficiency is something we’ve exercised over the years at RSR and it’s taught us valuable lessons. Less is often more, so we strive for simplicity throughout our business and our brand. 

For instance, we have pared down our Single Origin offerings over the years despite those types of coffees being my personal favorite, because they simply never performed well as compared to our blends from a sales perspective. Having too many products in a single category is not a virtue to a business. 

But we still want to serve this Single Origin-loving type of customer, so we have compensated for that decision by making the RSR Curated Coffee Subscription the primary realm of the rotating Single Origins that you don’t usually see in the open/non-subscription offerings, which adds value to our subscription business that is important to the sustainability of RSR. 

Balancing the needs of two different types of online customers and the needs of our key commercial accounts has been and continues to be a delicate balancing act here at RSR and one that has helped us succeed as a business.