‘The Shark Tank effect is real’: Copper Cow Coffee’s Debbie Wei Mullin on growing a modern CPG brand

It’s been a crazy year for brands in the CPG space.

That’s what Debbie Wei Mullin, founder and CEO of Copper Cow Coffee, said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. The home-brewed Vietnamese coffee company has been around since 2017 and has been growing over the years. But the pandemic changed some strategies, as well as many of its revenue channels.

When Copper Cow first started out, it relied heavily on wholesale. It inked deals with both grocers the department stores as a way to get its name out. In those early days, it only had one SKU of pour-over coffee -- and 90% of Copper Cow’s revenue came from wholesale accounts, including Williams Sonoma and other high-end stores. Over the years, as Copper Cow built out its digital marketing and grew its product line, the revenue mix has changed. Today, only 20% of Copper Cow’s revenue comes from wholesale.

The pandemic accelerated that revenue shift -- before the coronavirus first hit, department stores made up 50% of Copper Cow’s wholesale revenue. But when stay-at-home quarantines first began, that channel completely dried up.

“We had purchase orders that were sitting on the dock,” Mullin said. Going forward, she said, “I don’t see [department stores] being a core part of the business.”

But even with department stores closed, Mullin said wholesale revenue still spiked. “Our wholesale sales grew immensely, even even with the department stores falling off -- just because the grocery opportunity suddenly became much larger,” she said.

Direct-to-consumer sales have also been growing -- the brand appeared on the show Shark Tank recently, which gave it a boost.

For now, said Mullin, the focus is on growing -- both sales and Copper Cow’s SKUs. The e-commerce business, she said, was “the number one place for us to be able to really form community -- and to be able to experiment with our products.” With that, she went on, “we’re excited to be launching some new products, to be able to try out a lot of new exciting flavors.”