Tandem Coffee is a third-wave coffee roaster based in Portland, Maine. With two locations, award-winning coffees, and a vibe CN Traveler described as "your cool older sibling's city apartment," Tandem is a local institution with a thriving ecommerce business behind it.
By the time Tandem asked us to rebuild their website, we had been working together for years — long enough that the conversation started from what the business needed rather than from a brief.
A coffee roaster's website carries an unusual load. It is a storefront for a product that is at its best for a matter of weeks. It is a subscription engine for people who would rather it simply arrived. And it is the online face of two cafés that a great many of its customers have actually stood inside. Get that third job wrong and the first two feel like they belong to a different company.
The site they had did all three adequately and none of them especially well. And the subscription program — the part of a coffee business that compounds — was running on a platform that had become the constraint rather than the engine.
We rebuilt the site front to back rather than reskinning it, because the problems were not on the surface.
That meant the storefront and the back end together: how coffees are presented and told apart, how a subscription is chosen and then changed by the person who owns it, and how the whole thing is administered day to day by a small team whose actual job is roasting coffee and running cafés.
We moved the subscription program onto a new platform. Switching subscription infrastructure underneath a live program is the least glamorous work in ecommerce and among the easiest to get badly wrong — every existing subscriber is a person with a schedule, a payment method and an expectation, and none of them agreed to be part of a migration.
The rest was the work that makes a site read as a brand rather than a template: copywriting, graphic design, and a pop-up feature built for a roaster whose calendar is full of things a standard theme has no idea how to display.
Tandem got a site that reads like the cafés, and a subscription program on infrastructure that stopped being the limit.
The more telling detail is the arrangement. This was not a big-bang project handed over at the end and left alone. It ran as an ongoing retainer — which is how a business with two cafés and a roastery keeps a website current, instead of rebuilding it in a panic every few years.
We come up with lots of ideas that we would never be able to pull off ourselves. We pitch those ideas to First Pier and they figure out how to do it.
Will Pratt, Owner — Tandem Coffee
Tandem's own description of the relationship, quoted above, is the most accurate one a client has given us.
It describes a specific kind of engagement, and it is not the one most agencies are built for. A project agency is optimized around scope: the thing was defined, built, delivered, invoiced. What Tandem needed was capacity — somewhere to send an idea that arrived on a Tuesday because a coffee is landing, or a pop-up is happening, or the subscription program should work differently this year than it did last.
The rebuild is what made that possible, rather than the other way round. You cannot say yes quickly on a site you are afraid to touch. Rebuilding front to back was partly about the storefront and mostly about buying back the ability to keep changing it.
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