In June 2018, Pernell Cezar and his childhood friend Rod Johnson started selling coffee out of Cezar’s garage. Now, their brand, BLK & Bold, is sold on Amazon, in some Target stores and elsewhere. And its getting shout-outs as a brand to buy to show support for Black-owned businesses.
BLK & Bold Speciality Beverages’ journey has been a rapid one, with months that felt “like years,” Cezar says on the latest edition of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast.
The past two months have been “an emotional rollercoaster,” he says. Being the first nationally distributed Black-owned coffee business “comes with a lot of responsibility for our community.”
Cezar and Johnson, two Black men who are childhood friends from Gary, Indiana, and “overconsumers of coffee,” Cezar says, based their brand in Des Moines, Iowa with a push to help lift up the community. “Coffee is relatively underdeveloped in Des Moines,” and so is being a Black founder of a business, Cezar says.
After outgrowing its first commercial space, the company is moving to a larger one. “We had to prove that we could get to that point to play at the caliber of national distribution,” he says.