Jamie Nichols has always had a love for good coffee and great food. When he moved back to Thunder Bay in 2011, he noticed a gap in the local food and beverage industry: the absence of specialty coffee roasters. Nichols decided to fill the gap himself and opened Rose N Crantz Roasting Co., a coffee shop and specialty roastery, in 2013. While the business is now a staple in the Thunder Bay community, Nichols had another innovative trick up his sleeve for the city’s coffee lovers to enjoy. He just needed help getting the word out.
Rose N Crantz’s mission is to make specialty coffee an experience for everyone. For Nichols and his team, that means bringing the best coffee the world has to offer to customers all over Canada, including those in remote communities. When they noticed that steeped coffees had become a popular offering in the world of specialty coffee, they wanted to bring that option to the Thunder Bay community. After a year of development, Boreal Brew, a fresh-roasted, single-serve coffee to go, was born. “It looks like a large tea bag that’s full of ground coffee. It is nitro-sealed to preserve the freshness of the roast. And it has a much longer shelf life because of the packaging process,” explains Nichols. To enjoy the coffee, you simply rip open the bag, put it in a mug, pour hot water over it, and let it steep, after which, the bag can then be composted. The product is ideal for the active and outdoorsy Thunder Bay community, but “we were so focused on the product development, that looking at the strategic marketing and promotion of it hadn’t really risen to the top of the priority list,” admits Nichols.
Rose N Crantz had a long-standing relationship with the Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC) in Thunder Bay which proved instrumental in helping the roastery navigate the early days of their business. The CEDC understood how hard Nichols and his team worked on their Boreal Brew product and wanted to support them in planning a successful launch. They suggested Nichols apply for Digital Main Street’s Digital Transformation Grant (DTG) program which provides small businesses with a digital assessment, online training, and a $2,500 grant to implement their Digital Transformation Plan (DTP).
Nichols’ DTP focused entirely on the Boreal Brew launch strategy. The grant funds allowed Rose N Crantz to hire a professional marketing company to develop product photography and videography assets for their launch campaign. They also invested in high-quality photography and videography gear for their own ongoing content creation work. Finally, Nichols deployed social media ads to help educate their audience about Boreal Brew and generate buzz for their launch.
“We also took full advantage through that whole process of the digital service squad,” says Nichols “and I think that it would be a disservice to the whole program if I didn’t talk about how great that was.” Nichols credits the local Thunder Bay Digital Service Squad with helping the Rose N Crantz team keep their launch plan on track. He notes they challenged his team to think expansively and push the boundaries of their imagination, “They helped with brainstorming, provided constructive feedback on ideas and concepts for the plans as they were developing […], and they just gave us that sounding board that we really needed at that time.”
The year of product development and months of marketing planning paid off. Nichols says there was a great deal of buzz on social media when the product launched and that momentum carried over into the brick-and-mortar arm of the business. Foot traffic and sales in the cafe have more than doubled since implementing the DTP tactics, and the business has also grown from three to seven employees. “Without all the different components of the Digital Transformation Grant, I don’t know if we would have been able to launch [Boreal Brew] as successfully as we did,” reflects Nichols. With a banner year under their belts, the team at Rose N Crantz is looking ahead to their second decade of business with a focus on ensuring sustainability, future growth, and ongoing work-life balance for everyone within the company.
