Roasting a new approach to customer experience
Sharing the experience and story of speciality coffee
Founded in 1924, family-owned Ferris Coffee & Nut has spent more than a century creating moments of joy for people to connect, crafting exceptional coffee and food products out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Today, the century-old company serves customers through both its retail locations and its growing ecommerce business, roasting more than a million pounds of coffee a year while sourcing single-origin beans and blends through long-term relationships with growers around the world.
Vervint partnered with Ferris to better understand its retail and direct-order customers, leading research and workshops to define who they were, how they experienced the brand, and where new opportunities existed. The result was a framework Ferris could use to guide future brand and product strategy.
Understand two distinct customer bases
Gain clarity on how retail shoppers and direct-order/ecommerce customers experience Ferris differently.
Validate the real customer experience
Move past assumptions to concretely define how customers actually interact with Ferris’ products and brand.
Uncover new opportunities for growth
Identify openings for new brand and product strategies without losing the care Ferris is known for.
Getting to know the Ferris customer
Ferris didn’t have a clear picture of who was buying its coffee, or why. Retail shoppers and direct-order customers moved through very different experiences, but the company lacked a framework for understanding what each group actually wanted from a brand built on nearly a century of craft.
Vervint led a series of research efforts and workshops with Ferris to change that, working to define and validate exactly who their customers were and how they experienced the company’s coffee, products, and brand. Rather than starting from assumptions, the process was built to surface real customer insight, the same intentional, sourcing-with-care mindset Ferris applies to the single-origin beans and blends it procures from growers around the world.
Turning research into a reusable framework
Rather than guess at what would resonate, Vervint worked alongside Ferris to validate real answers: who their customers were, how those customers experienced the brand and its products, and where the clearest opportunities for growth were hiding. Every insight was tested against real customer input.
The result was a strategic framework Ferris could apply across future brand and product decisions, a repeatable way to keep customer understanding at the center of its growth as the company steps into its second century.
With a clear, validated understanding of who its customers are and what they need, Ferris is set up to keep creating those moments of joy for people to connect, whether someone’s picking up a bag of beans downtown or having one shipped to their door, for another hundred years to come.
