Launching a Meghalaya coffee brand to a sold-out first harvest

The brief

A first-generation founder growing arabica in the Khasi hills, with one harvest, no ad budget to speak of, and a story national coffee media had never heard. Sell the harvest, and build a waitlist for the next one.

What was actually hard

Specialty coffee marketing is saturated with the same tasting-notes vocabulary, and a small Meghalaya farm cannot outspend Bangalore roasters. The founder also refused — rightly — to lean on exotic-Northeast framing. The story had to be about the coffee being good, with the origin as proof, not as costume.

What we did

We put the harvest itself on camera. Eighteen creators — Shillong musicians, Guwahati food accounts, two national coffee reviewers we pitched directly — received green-to-roast kits and documented the same lot from cherry to cup. In parallel, our PR desk placed the founder's story in two national business outlets and nine regional ones, timed to land the week the online store opened.

The work

The anchor film followed one bag of coffee from the farm ridge to a Shillong café counter, scored by a local artist. Creator content stayed deliberately un-uniform: a musician brewed it backstage, a food reviewer cupped it against a mainland benchmark, a travel vlogger drove the actual farm road. Every piece pointed at one product page with the harvest counter visible.

The numbers

The full first harvest sold out in 19 days against a 90-day plan. Customer acquisition cost came to ₹86 — driven by earned reach rather than spend. The next-harvest waitlist closed at four times the volume of the first.