Boxwood Coffee.
Specialty coffee roastery in New Jersey. They roast the beans in NJ and sell online nationwide: coffee, tea, brewing equipment, subscriptions. Plus their own cafes. I built their Shopify store from a visual reference. From kickoff to launch, 2 weeks.
- Client
- Boxwood Coffee Roastery
- Role
- Solo Shopify build
- Stack
- Shopify OS 2.0 · Native Subscriptions
- Year
- 2026
What the client had.
A visual reference from another specialty coffee brand: style, tone, the blocks needed on the homepage. They needed a site that looks like a premium roastery from the first scroll, not a Shopify template glued together.
- Retail: sell coffee and tea by 1, 2, 5 lb.
- Coffee subscription with three tiers.
- Sell equipment: grinders, filters, scales.
- B2B channel: catering and wholesale inquiries through the site.
- Multiple cafes with addresses and hours.
- Careers pages (the roastery is growing, they hire).
- A journal blog for retention and SEO.
Not just a coffee shop. The full infrastructure of a specialty coffee brand: retail plus wholesale plus catering plus subscriptions plus cafes plus content.
What the client got.
- 01A store covering everything the brand needs in one theme. Retail (coffee and tea), equipment sales, native subscriptions, catering inquiries, wholesale forms, gift cards, cafe pages, careers, journal blog.
- 0220+ custom pages and collections. Catering, education, find-us, careers (two versions), wholesale (three forms for different B2B segments), about, FAQ, subscription, gift. Each built from blocks made for the brand, not pulled from a template.
- 03The brand team manages the storefront themselves. New coffee origins, seasonal offers, prices, banners. All from the admin, without me. Lineup changes, site updates in an hour.
- 04Subscription model live on day one through native Shopify Subscriptions. Recurring revenue from launch, no extra services to configure before going public.
- 052 weeks from kickoff to public launch.
Why Shopify works for specialty coffee.
Specialty coffee is a business model with many small operations. Subscriptions, retail, wholesale, gift cards, cafes, equipment. You need one platform for all of it, otherwise the brand drowns in integrations and hosting bills.
A custom site for this kind of business costs
- Several times more expensive to build, plus a monthly hosting bill on top.
- Stripe or payment gateway configured separately.
- Subscription engine bolted on separately.
- Support and security on you.
- Every content change goes through a developer.
Shopify costs
- One monthly subscription, base plan. Included: admin, cart, checkout, global payments, inventory, BNPL, subscriptions.
- The theme is a one-time job with me. After that the client runs the store.
For a specialty coffee shop this means the team focuses on roasting beans and running cafes, not on development.
Subscriptions, the highest-value revenue piece for a coffee brand, are live on day one through native Shopify Subscriptions. Specialized tools can be plugged in later as the subscription program grows.
Where Shopify does not fit
- Deep B2B checkout customization with net-30 terms.
- Specific ERP integrations for large wholesale.
- A unique React or Vue front-end with craft SaaS-level animations.
Then Shopify Plus with headless, or a separate custom front-end. Boxwood did not fall into that category.