In our first episode of Connected Thinking, our Senior Account Manager, Tom Milne sits down with Georgia Roads, Head of Marketing at Black Sheep Coffee.
With a career spanning hospitality startups, agency life, and high street brands like LEON, Paris Baguette and Quarter Spirits, Georgia brings a wealth of experience in building brands that connect both in-store and online. Now leading marketing at Black Sheep, she’s driven the brand’s bold transformation to help push the brand to the forefront of consumers’ minds.
They chat about everything from imposter syndrome and ditching the “play-it-safe” approach on social, to the viral Matcha 2.0 campaign that shattered gender stereotypes (spoiler: it’s not just for the girlies). From constantly testing to building a content engine that seamlessly blends paid, owned, and earned media, Georgia shares how they’re turning online buzz into in-store footfall.
You started at Black Sheep Coffee as a freelancer back in 2023. What’s the story from that moment to now?
I went freelance and Black Sheep Coffee was actually one of my first clients. I got the gig by cold emailing the founder who was running the socials at the time by himself. We’ve come a really long way in a year! I started as a freelancer and had a massive interest in partnerships in my career and looked at Black Sheep and just saw such potential for the brand.
I started with onboarding partnerships. I brought in the Unidays partnership that led to a lot of NPD and product development, and we brought in the functional health range. That led up to matcha, which was our massive campaign last June, it was a full 360 and I would say put Black Sheep on Gen Z's map and radar.
By that point, I was still operating as a contractor. I'd done all this stuff and this campaign so by then it was like, ‘this is crazy’, you actually just need to join us full time because I was basically doing a full time role for them.
Black Sheep has built more than a customer base, it’s a real community, even a cult following. What’s been key to building that kind of loyalty across your marketing efforts?
The app is obviously huge for us. We redesigned the app making it much more user friendly. We run loads of promotions through the app throughout the year. We're not afraid to do an offer in that sense if it works for us, we found that's really driven people in.
I think also just from a loyalty perspective, really tapping into Gen Z, the Unidays partnership has helped us tremendously. It's made us the choice over certain competitors where they might have chosen a competitor over us and we're not afraid to say that, but Unidays has kept them coming back to us.
We wanted to lean more into a younger demographic and build a cult following. It’s been an all or nothing journey. I think we’ve grown with our community. It’s like ‘Oh we’re on your radar’ and they’re very much on ours. It’s this really nice open relationship where we’re both growing together.
How do you turn online buzz, whether it's organic or owned, into actual footfall and loyal fans? Any channels or tactics that are really surprising you right now?
Having a social first strategy is everything at the moment, down to the products that we're bringing out, the first thing I'm looking at is how are we going to market on socials? And then we're building out the campaign from there.
Not everyone always starts with that approach and that's definitely the approach to lead on because that’s what's driving people into stores, it’s the social world, it's influencers.
We've never paid an influencer before, our entire community is all just super organic, a lot of micro led creators. I feel like having that on the ground strategy really works for getting people into stores.
You’re across a lot of touchpoints, digital, in-store, partnerships & social. What’s your approach to building a joined-up, multi-medium strategy that actually delivers results?
A social first strategy. I think in a lot of businesses you'll get the product, you'll then go through processes of design, then you'll do press and the last thing you look at is social. But actually, if you haven't looked at what that hook is to begin with, then you could be messing up your entire product launch and your marketing campaign.
The first thing I look at with a product is what's the hook? How is it going to land on socials? Are people going to connect with it in that way? And then we build it out from there. Unfortunately, if I don't think it's going to sell in that way, I'll be very transparent about that with the team and say ‘I don't really see it for the audience that we're trying to connect with right now.’
Also we're a very joined up team. We recently built a category and product team, which is all the heads of departments. You have everything from supply chain to NPD to data to make sure that we are all making joined up decisions. I think in so many businesses that I've been in before, you all sit separately and then there are dots that are missing no matter what that might be.
The best thing we can have is us preempting - based on the previous successes of drinks - and then going to the supply chain saying, ‘you need to over-order on this one because we know it’s going to do well'. Having that joint strategy across all departments has really served us well in the last year.
Black Sheep has never played it safe; it’s bold, it’s rebellious. How do you keep your USP as you scale across new stores, new audiences, new platforms?
I think we played safe for a while. I would say up until one of our most recent campaigns. It's very hard to remain ‘you’ whilst not getting caught up in the noise of other brands. I feel everyone's trying to pigeonhole their content to fit into one box because it's very easy and it's a quick win and you know it works.
You take risks that you don't know are going to pay off… but when they do, that's the beauty of it. I think it's coming back to our core identity, remembering who we are, understanding that we've obviously come a long way in a year and that we have new audience types, but who is that cool Black Sheep Coffee drinker and who is that person?
It's about not losing sight of that. No matter what journey you're on and what products you're developing, it's coming back to our core ethos, core range of products and scaling it out from there.
The Matcha 2.0 (Not just for the Girlies) campaign this year flipped the script. Can you take us behind the scenes? How did the idea come to life?
I'll give full credit to my social media manager there. She's one of my best friends, which I think is why we have such a great working relationship and why we've been able to have such a strong power on social so far.
She Whatsapp’d me one day and was like, I really think we need to get a hairy biker holding a matcha. She said, what's the antithesis of this kind of matcha drinker?
It's someone who's masculine and maybe drives a motorbike and people just wouldn't expect it. It's matcha 2.0, it's totally reimagined, it's not just for the girlies. She came up with the idea and I had the tagline.
Sometimes with these campaigns, you can overthink it. Do I talk to a creative agency? Who do I brief in? Do I try to get Oatly or one of our other partners on board? But then I thought a social first campaign would work.
We DM'd a couple of biker guys on Instagram that we thought would really suit. We invited them down, we worked hard, got a leather jacket made, and literally went five streets down from near our Bishopsgate store and got the guys on motorbikes and took some pictures. That's how we built the campaign, it was great.
For someone looking to get into the industry, what would be your top tip?
Connections are everything and don’t be afraid to ask. I did a ton of work experience across so many different fields. I always knew that I wanted to go into creative, but never really knew what area I would land in. I was doing music licensing and television and then media. I fell into this world by default.
I would say work experience is a good idea. I know that's easier said than done because a lot of it is about the connections you have.
Or If you're someone young starting out at Uni and you're maybe working in a restaurant or you're working in a coffee shop, if they're an independent brand, have they got anything going on on socials? Can you help them? Can you then use that as your portfolio? Just ask and again, don't be afraid.
With Black Sheep, I sent about 200 cold emails and 198 of them didn't land anywhere, but two of them were Black Sheep and Paris Baguette, which are two really massive brands. Just ask because if you don't put it out there, you're never going to get anything.
What marketing trends or consumer shifts are on your radar right now?
I think it's just keeping up with the demand. I couldn't really tell you anything from a trend perspective. Obviously, matcha is still huge, it's not going anywhere yet. For now it's just continuing to innovate in those areas. We've got a lot of really exciting product launches coming up this year.
That's one of the other things about Black Sheep that's been so great,we're all very new to this. There's not been a ton of red tape, so it's been ‘Oh that's a cool idea, let's do it.’ That's how we've operated and it's worked so far!
Favourite book or podcast you’d recommend?
My favourite book is one that I read a few years ago. It's called Invisible Women and it’s about how the world was built by men essentially, and how there's a data gap, it's really interesting.
Best piece of advice you’ve received?
To get out of my head. I think when you're in high pressure environments it's very easy to let imposter syndrome take over. A lot of the time it is just in your head.
I think obviously as the jobs get bigger and the targets get larger, it's very easy to run away from that, but actually, fake it till you make it, that’s the biggest piece of advice I could give anyone because you'll be all right.
