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Alfred Coffee: Email, Ecommerce & Subscription Growth 

Alfred Cof­fee is a 24-loca­tion cof­fee chain based in Los Ange­les, known for its aes­thet­ic cafes and the World Famous Iced Vanil­la Lat­te. Along­side the café busi­ness, Alfred runs an online store sell­ing cof­fee blends, matcha, syrups, brew­ing tools, and brand­ed mer­chan­dise, with bev­er­age prod­ucts avail­able on sub­scrip­tion. In 2023, Alfred engaged the Gray­box team to grow their ecom­merce busi­ness and acti­vate a large email sub­scriber list that had lit­tle infra­struc­ture to con­vert read­ers into buyers.

Outcome

Over three-plus years, Gray­box over­hauled Alfred’s ecom­merce mar­ket­ing tools, con­nect­ed their café and online cus­tomer data, and built an email pro­gram that now dri­ves mea­sur­able rev­enue. Ecom­merce sales are up 40% since the start of the engage­ment. Active bev­er­age ingre­di­ent sub­scribers have grown by 50%.

Results

Gray­box migrat­ed Alfred’s email pro­gram to Klaviyo, inte­grat­ed their café point-of-sale data through Toast, rebuilt their sub­scrip­tion noti­fi­ca­tions, and estab­lished a month­ly cam­paign pro­gram that has com­pound­ed in per­for­mance each year.

  • 40%
    increase in ecommerce sales since engagement start
  • 50%
    increase in active beverage ingredient subscribers
  • 23%
    year-over-year growth in email-attributed revenue

The Problem

Alfred had built one of the most recognizable coffee brands in Los Angeles, with loyal cafe customers, a strong social following, and a sizable email list. The online store wasn't keeping pace with the rest of the brand.

When Alfred approached our team, their email platform was Customer.io, which didn't integrate natively with Shopify. Revenue tracking and campaign attribution were limited, and their subscription business, selling vanilla syrup, matcha, and coffee on a recurring basis, had room to grow. The digital tools they had weren't set up to bring cafe visitors to the online store.

Alfred had marketing tools across Shopify, Recharge, Customer.io, and their own app, along with an enthusiastic customer base and a strong brand. The opportunity was in bringing those tools together to grow ecommerce revenue. 

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Through work­ing with Gray­box, our email and ecom­merce chan­nels have become mean­ing­ful dri­vers of the Alfred busi­ness, thanks to a strat­e­gy that bal­ances cre­ativ­i­ty with per­for­mance. The team has been an invalu­able resource across dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, bring­ing deep exper­tise across plat­forms and help­ing us build our entire email pro­gram from the ground up.

Becky Coulter, Marketing Director, Alfred Coffee

The Solution

Klaviyo Migration and Web Refresh

We migrated Alfred from Customer.io to Klaviyo, giving us native Shopify integration, direct connectivity with Recharge (their subscription platform), and later, integration with Toast, their cafe point-of-sale system. This migration made the automations, segmentation, and revenue tracking we built across the rest of the engagement possible.

We also refreshed Alfred's website alongside the migration with a focus on ecommerce conversion. The updated site streamlined navigation, added a dedicated subscription page with optimized product framing, and included a quiz to help customers identify the right subscription tier based on their coffee or matcha habits. As part of the refresh, we built a design system that could be used across digital marketing channels, including Alfred's email templates and automation layouts. This ensured the visual experience stayed consistent from the website through every customer communication.

Ecommerce Automation Buildout

With Klaviyo connected to Shopify, we built out the essential ecommerce email automations. We created a welcome offer popup on the site that offered new visitors a discount to encourage a first purchase while growing the subscriber list. Abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and winback flows all used dynamic coupon codes to bring undecided customers back, without anyone on the team having to run a manual campaign. Each automation also featured product recommendations based on what the customer had viewed or purchased.

Later in the engagement, we added a replenishment reminder flow that automatically prompts customers to reorder a beverage ingredient after a set number of days without a purchase, and uses that touchpoint to introduce subscription as a way to stay stocked without tracking it manually.

Email Campaign Strategy and Optimization 

We’ve utilized email campaign A/B testing throughout the engagement to home in on Alfred’s audience preferences. One such test revealed a consistent pattern: ecommerce-focused emails converted best in the evening, while cafe-focused campaigns had better engagement in the morning. We adjusted send timing accordingly and have maintained that split since. We also discovered single-product campaigns, particularly for vanilla syrup and matcha, consistently outperformed broader catalog emails, so we restructured the campaign calendar around unique, product-specific sends.

When resends of designed emails underperformed during the holidays, we tested plain-text follow-ups in their place. Those emails performed well enough to become a regular part of how we manage high-volume periods, and in some cases have outperformed the original designed send in both engagement and revenue.

Turning Cafe Visits into Online Sales with Toast

Alfred uses Toast as their point-of-sale system across all 24 cafes. Connecting Toast to Klaviyo let us reach Alfred's cafe customers through email and contributed to 20% or greater growth in Alfred's engaged email list overall. Using order history, visit frequency, and product preferences, we built segmented email lists by location and purchase behavior. We used these segments to build campaigns that introduced the online store to cafe-only visitors and created a cafe-specific winback automation for anyone who hadn't visited or ordered in 90 days.

The Brentwood cafe anniversary campaign shows what this data made possible: an email send to a segmented list of customers local to that Los Angeles neighborhood drove a 123% increase in foot traffic at that location.

Rebuilding the Subscription Program with Recharge

Subscription adoption was an early focus of the engagement. Alfred had the products and the customer base to support recurring purchases, and we saw an opportunity to build the infrastructure around them.

We rebuilt the Recharge notification flows inside Klaviyo, replacing system-generated emails with branded communications in Alfred's look and voice, and built out a subscriber winback sequence. We also ran subscription-specific campaigns and tested different offers and positioning to identify what best drove adoption and retention. These efforts have contributed to active beverage ingredient subscribers growing by 50% since the engagement began.

Ongoing Campaign Planning

We also manage Alfred's monthly email calendar, covering ecommerce promotions, cafe activations, and partnership tie-ins with the film, beauty, and apparel brands Alfred collaborates with regularly. Each campaign type reaches a different segment of Alfred's audience, and the calendar keeps those efforts coordinated and tied to business goals throughout the year.

Email has become a way to extend the reach of Alfred's existing brand partnerships. Alfred's annual Make March Matter fundraiser with Children's Hospital Los Angeles had historically been a cafe-led activation. In 2025, we worked with the Alfred team to introduce an ecommerce component: a limited lavender vanilla syrup and coordinating drinkware, with a percentage of sales going to the fundraiser. Email campaigns throughout March highlighted both the products and the cause, resulting in a 112% increase in year-over-year ecommerce revenue for that period. The ecommerce element is now part of the annual campaign.

The program has also expanded to support cross-promotion of Cafe Matcha, a dedicated matcha cafe launched by Alfred's ownership group.

SEO & AEO

More recently, we added SEO to the engagement to grow Alfred's organic traffic alongside the email program. We began with a comprehensive technical audit to identify errors affecting search performance and surface opportunities for optimization. We resolved 404 errors, optimized header tag usage across the site, added and refined meta titles and descriptions for click-through, and created local business schema for all of Alfred's location pages, so each cafe has structured, search-readable information. Our team makes ongoing optimizations and recommendations to improve Alfred's visibility in both organic search and AI-generated search results. Since adding SEO services, organic clicks are up 23%, impressions have grown 130%, and average search position has improved from 13.2 to 6.9 year-over-year. 

“I’ve been on the Alfred account since the begin­ning of the engage­ment. I’m inspired by how seri­ous­ly their team takes the brand. They bring clear direc­tion on how they want things to look and feel, they’re gen­uine­ly curi­ous about try­ing new approach­es, and they’re close col­lab­o­ra­tors throughout.”

Jackson Jones, Marketing Strategist, Graybox

Key Solutions

Final Results

Three years into the engagement, Alfred's email program, subscription business, and organic search presence have all grown measurably. The work started with connecting tools that were running independently, and each phase since has added to what the previous one made possible.

Klaviyo as the unifying platform. Migrating to Klaviyo connected Alfred's Shopify store, Recharge subscription platform, and Toast point-of-sale system into one marketing program. Revenue tracking, audience segmentation, subscription notifications, and cafe audience targeting are centralized in one powerful platform.

Comprehensive automations. The automation suite covers key customer moments. It welcomes new subscribers with a first purchase offer, recovers abandoned carts with dynamic coupon codes, prompts ingredient repurchases before customers run out, and re-engages lapsed cafe visitors and subscribers. Email automations now account for 33% of Alfred's email-attributed revenue.

Campaign planning and optimization. Monthly campaign management has improved over time as testing has clarified what Alfred's audience responds to. Product-specific sends outperform broader catalog emails. Evening sends drive more ecommerce conversions. Partnership campaigns produce stronger results when they include an ecommerce component. Each of those findings shapes how the next month's calendar is built.

Organic growth that scales into all other channels. SEO has extended Alfred's reach beyond their existing customer base, bringing new visitors to a site already optimized for ecommerce. As organic traffic grows, it adds new subscribers and first-time buyers into the same program that loyal cafe customers and email subscribers move through.

  • 40%
    increase in ecommerce sales since engagement start
  • 50%
    increase in active beverage ingredient subscribers
  • 23%
    year-over-year growth in email-attributed revenue

Schedule a Consultation

Connecting your in-person and online channels starts with the right marketing tools. If your email program, point-of-sale data, and online store aren't working together yet, there's likely revenue you're not capturing. Book a consultation.

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