The June Highlight: Honoring Pride Month 🏳️🌈
This past month in June, Highlight was honored to work with multiple LGBTQIA+ brands to provide pro bono insights in support of Pride Month. We hope in providing this access to consumer feedback and data, we can help enable continued growth + success with these amazing brands. We truly believe in the importance of equal access to data across the board. The LGBTQIA+ owned brands Highlight has worked with include Love Good Fats, Attn: Grace, Explorer Cold Brew and more!
One of our Highlight team members was recently able to chat with Cason Crane, the founder of Explorer Cold Brew. Cason is building an innovative DTC coffee brand with a great story behind it. He himself is an avid explorer, traveling to over 100 countries. He was the first openly LGBT person to climb Mount Everest and the fifth youngest overall to climb Everest and the Seven Summits (the highest mountain on each continent). He did all of this to raise money for LGBT suicide prevention and now he is on his next big adventure!
As a new founder, he chatted about the origins of his business, what it was like to start during a pandemic, and how he believes insights can help small businesses like his! Read on and we promise you’ll probably fan-girl as much as we did with this unique story.
Meet Cason! 🏔
Where did your love for coffee arise?
Cason: I've always had a very deep appreciation for coffee. It's one of those things that has an incredible cultural and social resonance almost everywhere in the world. It is grown in over 50 countries around the world but even more importantly, it's a part of so many traditions, both informal and formal. I've always had an appreciation for it but never been an avid consumer of it, until the pandemic hit. I just started drinking it more and more because it was one of those few things I could do in my day that really felt like a treat to me. As many young people are, I'm also almost exclusively a cold coffee drinker- meaning I only drink like cold brew or iced lattes all year round. I was drinking a ton of it during the pandemic and I was like, geez, this is awesome but I really wish there was a way for me to get this super high quality coffee, and make it however I want to, including being able to choose my caffeine level. To me that was important because I'm a little bit more caffeine sensitive and cold brew has a ton of caffeine. It just felt like I'm making it in all these different ways but it's so one size fits all. So to solve that, we made this incredible cold brew concentrate. Explorer Cold Brew is a one to four ratio concentrate, so it has the same intensity of an espresso shot and it comes in four caffeine levels so that you can have your cold brew or whatever coffee beverage you're creating, at any time of day. Whether it's in the evenings when you want to have a decaf (if that's more your speed) or whatever it is, we have all the caffeine levels.
How was starting a business during the pandemic?
Cason: I feel so lucky and appreciative. The pandemic was so tragic for so many people and I just feel really lucky that I was able to escape a lot of that. And I mean, that said, I think it was a challenging time for everyone no matter what. For me, I tried to make the most of it and channel it as sort of an opportunity. I was very lucky to not have anyone who got really sick with COVID in my life and to channel that energy into starting this business. It was not what I expected to be doing. My background is in consulting and I was still doing that immediately prior to starting Explorer Cold Brew. I was a consultant for three and a half years at Bain and prior to that I was at Princeton for four years. I've also been an endurance athlete and mountaineer during that time. I love going and trying new things, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, going off the beaten track, and all that. So the pandemic really was a shift and put a lot of things in perspective.