When Craig Dubitsky looks at an industry, he sees what’s there—and what’s not.

The entrepreneur behind breakthrough brands such as Method, eos and Hello has now taken his approach—and some star power—to the coffee industry.

Happy, which Dubitsky co-founded with actor Robert Downey Jr., launched in February.

Downey and Dubitsky were introduced by a mutual friend who knew that each of them had been separately dreaming of a coffee startup. Dubitsky describes his partner as a “coffee savant” who can detect by taste the altitude at which coffee beans were grown. “He’s a coffee obsessive. I’m a brand and design obsessive, and retail obsessive,” Dubitsky said.

Happy—the company’s full name is We Are Happy LLC—was designed to make an emotional appeal to customers who until now have heard only from coffee brands that were too flowery, too macho, or too boring, said Dubitsky, speaking on the Marketer’s Brief podcast. By contrast, he said, few coffee brands have marketed the emotional benefits of coffee.

Dubitsky said he found cracks in the coffee space. Some coffee brands that have been around for decades haven’t aged in a way to be celebrated or venerated—they’ve just grown old, Dubitsky said. Others have adopted a hyper-masculine approach, turning their value proposition into a dare.

“It's like an arms race in coffee,” he said. “It’s like, how much caffeine can you pump into yourself?”

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“For us, I think part of the cultural crack was a lot of brands tend to focus on some mythical, mystical magic of the coffee,” said Dubitsky. “The part that we thought was open for some innovation was emotional innovation … it’s knowing that the coffee isn’t magical—people are magical. And I feel like a lot of brands treat people as targets or as commodities in a way. And we want to flip that.”

Downey loaned his star power to Happy’s debut, appearing on Zoom calls with the bosses of customers in need of an excuse to take the day after the Super Bowl off from work. And when he won his first Oscar earlier this month, he celebrated by posing with the statuette and a cup of Happy coffee.

Happy’s message about emotional well-being is tightly tied to a unique approach to its charitable mission. Instead of donating a portion of sales to a cause, Happy has given the National Alliance on Mental Illness an equity stake in its business.

Dubitsky recounted an early conversation between the founders that led them down this path.

“I'll never forget when I was talking with Robert about Happy as a word, and as a potential mark. And it was really this prescient moment, I still sort of get chills,” Dubitsky recounted. “He said, ‘Well, you know, that's really great. I get it. But not everybody’s happy. So what are we going to do about that?’”

Happy’s line includes ground and whole bean coffee, instant coffee, and k-cup pods, packaged in striking, spacelike cubes with soft edges.

From commodities to consumer goods

A former commodities trader, Dubitsky was a founding board member of the home cleaning products brand Method, and co-founded the lip-care brand eos before taking on the oral care industry with Hello Products.

In explaining his ability to find arbitrage in the consumer goods fields, Dubitsky quotes a lyric from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: “There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

“I’m always looking for these cracks,” Dubitsky said. “They’re just everywhere. And they drive me a little batty.”

Hello’s marketing veered away from the fear and negativity associated with much of the advertising in that field. By focusing on smiles, Hello found a niche and later found a buyer in toothpaste giant Colgate-Palmolive, which installed Dubitsky as its chief innovation strategist. Dubitsky remained with Colgate for three years.

“We didn’t have an exit; we had an entrance,” he said of Hello’s 2020 sale to Colgate. “We were a tiny little company. It was me, three people, and a dog. … And we were lucky that Colgate appreciated what we had been able to build. And as the largest oral care company in the world, to say that to us, this little startup, it was incredible.”