The Generic Best vs. Specific Best
If you’re opening a coffee shop and looking for a wholesale roaster to partner with, how can you choose from a sea of roasters all claiming to be “the best”? Dozens of roasters claiming to source and roast the best coffees on earth can’t all be telling the truth.
The generic best is lazy. It’s a cop-out that keeps you from being specific about who you are and what you hope to provide for your guests and partners.
Mission
A mission can save you from the trap of the generic best.
Our mission at Cat & Cloud is to “Inspire connection by creating memorable experiences.” We believe deeply in the power of day-to-day experiences and the opportunity each of us has to leave the people we come in contact with feeling better than we found them. For people who believe what we believe, we’re the best wholesale partner choice. Our mission is a point of alignment.
That's not to say we can ignore objective quality. We roast and source delicious coffee, but so do many of our contemporaries. When you operate in a specialty space, being good at what you do isn’t a differentiator, it’s simply the cost of being in the game. Sure, eight times out of ten I prefer our coffee but that’s a stylistic preference closely tied to the fact that I had a heavy hand in establishing our coffee style.
Claiming we’re the best in the generic sense just isn’t true. Claiming we’re the best in specific instances is true. Ignore the generic, embrace the specific.