How ModCup learned to build the brand before the business existed
Today I found out there’s a new coffee roaster operating in Jersey City. They’re called Jersey City Roasters. They’re about six months old, doing farmers markets, selling coffee wherever they can and building a customer base before they have a permanent café.
I looked through what they were doing and had this strange moment.
Fuck. That was us.
Thirteen years ago, that was Modcup.
We were turning up at farmers markets trying to convince people to drink our coffee. We didn’t have a proper roastery. We were roasting in a garage. We didn’t have multiple cafés, wholesale accounts or any of the infrastructure we have today.
We were just trying to make the thing exist.
Seeing another company at the beginning of that journey made me stop and ask a question I don’t think I ask myself very often.
How the fuck did we get from there to here?
First, I should say something about Jersey City Roasters. They’re buying better coffee six months into their existence than we were six months into ours.
That isn’t false modesty. They are.
Specialty coffee has changed enormously in thirteen years. The quality of green coffee available, processing, importing, information, equipment and access to producers has changed with it. In 2013, it was considerably harder for a tiny unknown roaster to get its hands on truly extraordinary coffee.
So this isn’t about looking at a new company and thinking, aren’t we better than them? Quite the opposite. Seeing them made me remember how fucking difficult the beginning is.
But it also made me realize something about Modcup that I probably couldn’t have articulated in 2013.
The brand existed before the business did.
When Modcup started, objectively, it wasn’t much of a business. It was basically an overly confident 35-year-old Englishman roasting coffee in a garage and turning up at farmers markets.
But we behaved like Modcup was already something.
There were confident proclamations about the 90-plus-point coffees we were serving that, looking back with thirteen more years of experience, were probably an 86 or 87 on a good day.
The confidence may have been slightly ahead of the coffee.
On our cart we had propane-fired, hand-pulled lever espresso machines because that was how we could make the thing work. We were trying to create an experience with whatever we could get our hands on.
And we kept telling everybody that we had a vintage Citroën truck coming.
Not just that we were going to own one. We were going to put a coffee roaster in the back of the fucking thing and roast coffee live in front of people.
There was only one slight problem.
We didn’t actually have the Citroën.
But I could see it.
And apparently that was enough.
We talked about the truck as though its existence were a minor administrative detail. This thing that was supposed to become one of the most recognizable physical expressions of Modcup existed mainly in my head.
Yet once you say something enough times, something interesting happens. You either eventually have to admit you were talking complete bollocks, or you have to make the thing real.
Within twelve months of operating the cart and farmers markets, we opened our first café. About six months after that, eighteen months after we started, the fucking Citroën actually arrived.
And we did exactly what we’d been telling everybody we were going to do.
We roasted coffee out of it.
There’s something completely irrational about that. But I also think there’s something incredibly important about it.
We weren’t waiting for the business to become successful before manufacturing a brand identity. We were already projecting a world.
The brand arrived first.
The business has spent thirteen years catching up with it.
I grew up in Birmingham, England, and the impact The Stone Roses and Oasis had on me cannot be understated.
Not just the records. The attitude.
There was something incredibly powerful about watching these bands from Manchester behave as though they were culturally important before the rest of the world had necessarily agreed.
The Stone Roses seemed to possess this almost mystical certainty about themselves. Then Oasis came along and made the same kind of self-belief impossible to ignore. They behaved like they were the biggest band in the world before the evidence remotely justified it.
They didn’t wait for someone to confer legitimacy on them.
They conferred it on themselves.
British culture can be brutal about ambition.
Don’t get above yourself.
Who do you think you are?
Don’t make a fucking fool of yourself.
The Roses and Oasis seemed to answer that in slightly different ways, but the message I took from both was essentially the same.
We know exactly who we are. Who the fuck are you?
I loved that.
The circumstances might say small, but your self-conception doesn’t have to.
I think there was a lot of that in early Modcup. I wasn’t standing behind that farmers market cart thinking, wouldn’t it be lovely if one day this became a nice little coffee business?
In my head, it was already Modcup.
The folding table was just where Modcup happened to be standing at that particular moment.
There was arrogance in that. There was definitely naïveté. There was probably a willingness to look fucking ridiculous.
But there was also belief.
And belief creates commitment.
Once you’ve told everybody that the Citroën is coming, you’d better go and find the fucking Citroën.
I think people sometimes misunderstand this kind of belief as manifestation. As though you imagine something hard enough and somehow the universe conspires to deliver it.
That isn’t what happened.
The Citroën didn’t materialize because I believed in it.
Believing in it made me behave differently.
We talked about Modcup as though it mattered before there was much evidence that it did. We made decisions for the company we wanted to become rather than simply the company we were.
And then we had to do the fucking work.
That distinction matters.
You don’t manifest things by sitting around imagining them. You believe something strongly enough that it changes what you do.
You tell people. You make connections. You take risks. You commit money you probably shouldn’t. You put yourself in situations where failure is going to be embarrassing.
And then you find out whether you can make reality agree with you.
Thirteen years later, Modcup is a very different business. There are cafés, staff, roasting, wholesale accounts, systems, payroll and all the boring shit required to keep a real company alive.
But somewhere underneath all of it, I think that original piece of irrationality is still there.
And I hope it always is.
Businesses need discipline. They need margins, systems, training, operations and cash flow. Eventually all of that boring shit is what allows the interesting shit to survive.
But somewhere underneath it has to be energy and belief.
You have to be able to see something that doesn’t exist yet.
You have to be stupid enough to say it out loud.
And then you have to do the really difficult part.
Make reality catch up with the bullshit.
That’s what the Citroën taught me.
Tell everybody there’s a fucking truck coming.
Then go find the fucking truck.