A creator sourcing brief for a specialty coffee roaster.

The client

A specialty coffee roaster with six stores in one major city, opening their first location in a second city within ninety days. The brand had real specialty credentials — direct-trade sourcing, in-house roasting, a head roaster the regional coffee community took seriously. They had never run creator marketing in any structured way. Their previous expansion attempt, two years earlier, had stalled at the awareness stage despite a strong product. The team's read on what had gone wrong was correct: the second market already knew the chains it knew, and didn't know them.

The problem

Coffee culture in the target city is the kind that argues about extraction times. The audience that buys specialty coffee there is sophisticated and skeptical — they will write off a new brand as "another chain trying to be artisanal" by week two, and a misaligned creator partnership in week one would lock that perception in for the entire opening quarter. The brief wasn't about reach. It was about credibility, intact, in time to turn the first ninety days of trading into a regular customer base.

The standard playbook wouldn't work. A general lifestyle creator with 200k followers in the city would have produced reach without conversion — and worse, would have signaled to the target customer that the brand was treating coffee culture as a marketing surface rather than the product it is. What the brand needed was a creator the local coffee community already trusted on coffee specifically. Not aesthetic. Not lifestyle. Coffee.

Our approach

We treat sourcing the same way we treat signing: vetted, fit-first, never just a name on a list. The first week of the engagement was three long conversations with the brand's marketing team — and one with the head roaster — to actually pin down what "credibility" meant in the target market. The answer was specific. We needed a creator who had visited specialty coffee farms, who could name producers and roasters in conversation, who had previously posted about brewing methods with technical depth rather than just photogenic latte art. None of the creators on the agency's prior shortlist fit that profile. The candidates we needed weren't on standard influencer-marketing rosters at all.

What we did

The universe build took two weeks. We mapped the food and coffee creator landscape in the target city, end to end — not just the accounts with the largest followings, but the smaller, denser accounts the local coffee community actually paid attention to. Eleven candidates cleared the first filter on category credentials. None had more than 80,000 followers. Most were in the 15,000 to 50,000 range, which the brand initially flinched at.

We scored every candidate on three filters: category depth (had they visited farms, could they name producers, did they post about brewing technique with actual fluency); audience fit (did their followers genuinely consume specialty coffee, or just take pictures of it); and prior partnership history (had they previously worked with small roasters in a way that had read as legitimate). Three creators came out of the filter intact.

Outreach went to all three. All three responded inside ten days. Due diligence is where the work usually compresses for sourcing teams, and it's where we don't compress: we visited two cafes in person with each interested candidate. Watched how they ordered. Watched what they noticed about the coffee. Watched what their audience asked them in real conversations, not in DMs we'd see filtered through their team. This is the part of sourcing most processes skip, and it's the part most matches actually fail on.

One creator self-eliminated after the cafe visits — she had a pre-existing relationship with a different roaster that would have created a positioning conflict the brand wouldn't have seen until launch week. The other two went forward as the shortlist. The brand selected within forty-eight hours of the recommendation.

The contract was structured with the second engagement in mind. Tight usage rights — paid usage windowed at six months, with extension priced separately. Kill protection at 100% post-creative-approval. Right-of-first-refusal on renewal at the end of the twelve-week launch window. The creator's lawyer had two redlines; we accepted one and held the other. The deal signed within ninety-six hours of the brand's selection.

The result

• Opening week footfall 38% above the brand's internal projection. The brand's prior city opening had come in at projection — they'd modeled this one assuming the same trajectory.
• Week-two return-visit rate measured 24% above the brand's modeled retention curve. The first-week visitors were the right first-week visitors.
• 412 first-time customers acquired through the campaign, measured via a dedicated discount code embedded in the creator's content. Average order value tracked materially above store-wide average, which the brand's analytics team flagged as a separate signal.
• Comments section on the campaign posts read like organic recommendation, not paid endorsement. Variants of "tried it on her rec, it's actually good" appeared more than forty times across the campaign window. Skeptical comments — present in every prior brand-marketing run the team had done — were notably absent.
• Brand has retained the creator on a twelve-month ongoing engagement covering future store openings. The pricing structure on the second deal reflected the brand's confidence in the match.
• The sourced creator entered representation conversations with us during the campaign window. Sourcing turned into a signing.