Refinery29's co-founder started a new business.
It's in a can.
Good morning everyone. Despite my doctor’s flag that I have slightly-elevated mercury levels, I can’t stop eating the tuna burger at The Odeon. On the train home from dinner last night, I got a text from Caroline Calloway that I need to work on my zillennial TikTok coverage. I am including a special report from Ms. Calloway in the Water Cooler section today.
Today’s newsletter includes: Caper’s misreporting on The Gansevoort Hotel, “Campus” (Rostam’s Version), and a suggestion to switch your Zillow search zone to Long Island’s North Fork.
Today on the Feed Me Job Board: Bumble, Interview Magazine, and Studs. If you submit a job that looks sus or doesn’t pay, I will not approve it to be on the board.
Refinery29’s co-founder started a new business.
Last year, I learned that Philippe von Borries (co-founder and CEO of Refinery29 who ran the media company for 13 years) started a new sparkling coffee business called Esspo. He happened to have some product samples on him when we were hanging out at a friend’s house, and I was surprised a) by how far along the business was, and b) that this was what someone who sold his company to Vice for $400mm wanted to do next. Esspo officially launched this week, so I caught up with Philippe this morning.
Emily Sundberg: Many media operators from the early 2010s have decided their second ventures should be ANOTHER media business (Ben Smith and Semafor, Jon Kelly and Puck). Why did you decide to take the coffee route instead of media again?
Philippe von Borries: “We’ve always been brand first people. Even in media. That’s always been a core motivation and a core orientation. The interesting thing about CPG is that while the product has to be amazing, so much of it is in the storytelling and how you get people to be excited about your product. So we saw a big miss in coffee — it’s kind of a brown, stale, forgettable shelf. No fun. No innovation.
In regards to specifically why not another media brand, we were kind of excited about a different challenge in a different space. We also very organically started to make a product that we and others became obsessed with. Last but not least after a decade of working in digital it was really nice to work on an actual physical product.”
ES: I tried a very early version last year. What was your R&D process like?
PvB: “You were one of the first to try it! First of all we learned so much - we’ve been at this for almost two years and we had to educate ourselves from scratch. We made hundreds of different recipes and formations. You sort of identify what you want, what your perfect flavor profile is, what combination of coffee, carbonation, flavors, etc. Once we nailed that we partnered with a big global flavor house to commercialize the drinks because obviously whatever works in your kitchen doesn’t work at scale and we were very focused on certain key things like caffeine amount, calories, sugar and natural products.
Also, we sampled the product with A LOT of people to continuously make them better and would feed that data into the R&D process to make the product better.
One more thing: the packaging and design in CPG is obviously just as important as the product itself and we spent LOTS of cycles to develop something that would really stand out on shelf and differentiate in that space.”
ES: Where can we buy Esspo, and will there be more products besides coffee or is that always going to be the core product focus?
PvB: “You can buy it on TikTok Shop and DTC and it’s going to be launching nationally on shelves in April (more on that later). The product focus is energy and coffee is our passion and where we see so much of gap but there could be other expansions in the future.”
ES: While I have you, any other thoughts on the state of media….
PvB: “So much disaggregation in media over the past few years so it seems like the next phase will be about aggregation as media brands need more scale and advertisers need to consolidate where they spend money. Also, there’s a significant shift with people wanting to be offline and unplugged and as a result, there are going to be so many interesting new opportunities in the offline space for media companies.
Media is exciting again!! So many people creating brands and followings that are actually organic and that people care about. It feels like 2010 again!”
