From bean to browser: a full-stack specialty coffee storefront built from scratch
Freddybean Roasters is a Canadian specialty coffee roaster building a direct-to-consumer brand around small-batch sourcing and freshly roasted bags shipped to subscribers' doors. With no existing eCommerce footprint, Freddybean came to AtlanticWorks to launch a complete online business: product catalog, subscription engine, and ad-ready merchant feeds, all delivered in a single coordinated build.
Launching a specialty coffee brand online is a deceptively complex first move. The product is perishable, freshness-sensitive, and sold in a category dominated by entrenched players with deep ad budgets. Freddybean needed more than a storefront. They needed a coordinated launch system that could capture demand from day one, convert curious first-time buyers into recurring subscribers, and feed product data cleanly into Google and Meta so paid acquisition could turn on the moment the site went live.
The hard part was not building any single piece. It was making them all launch together: catalog, subscriptions, email flows, and shopping feeds, so growth was not gated by whichever component shipped last.
We built Freddybean's commerce stack end-to-end, sequenced so each layer reinforced the next.
We designed and developed a custom Shopify storefront tuned for a specialty coffee brand: roast-level filtering, origin storytelling on product pages, and a checkout flow optimized for the realities of perishable goods (delivery windows, freshness messaging, weight-based shipping). The information architecture was built around two primary buyer journeys, one-time discovery and recurring subscription, so neither path felt like an afterthought.
Rather than treating subscriptions as a bolt-on, we made them a first-class part of the storefront. Customers can choose grind, roast frequency, and bag size at the product page; manage their plans via a self-serve portal; and pause or swap without contacting support. This shifted the brand's economics from one-off transactions to predictable recurring revenue.
We launched the storefront with a working set of automated flows: welcome series, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, and replenishment reminders timed to roast freshness. Every flow was wired to subscription events so subscribers and one-time buyers received different messaging from the start.
We connected the Shopify catalog to Google Merchant Center and Meta Commerce Manager with clean, attribute-rich product data, which meant Freddybean could run Performance Max, Shopping, and dynamic Meta ads against their full catalog the day the site went live, with no manual feed maintenance.
Freddybean launched with a complete, integrated commerce system rather than a piecemeal stack, which meant every channel (organic, email, paid) had something to point at on day one. Subscriptions became the brand's primary retention mechanism, and the connected merchant feeds removed the friction that usually delays paid acquisition for new DTC launches by weeks or months.
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