Philz Coffee, Serving Customers via the Cloud – One Cup at a Time

December 11, 2013

It seems like every time I turn around there’s a hot new coffee

(opens in new tab)(opens in new tab)shop serving the best beans and the best coffee in town. For some it’s about cost, for some it’s about the beans, and for others it’s about the freshness, but for Philz Coffee(opens in new tab) the story is different. If you don’t know Philz, it had its start in the Mission District of San Francisco and since 2003 has been taking a “customer-centric” approach to coffee, one cup at a time.

Philz is named after Phil Jaber, who started working on the perfect cup of coffee almost 25 years ago. Phil began his coffee career experimenting and creating great-tasting coffee blends and finally decided to start selling his coffee at the corner grocery at Folsom and 24th in 2003, but that was just the start. After perfecting his blends, Phil wanted to make sure each cup was made in a way that brought out all the flavors of the coffee and thus the Philz Way of coffee making was born. Using a custom designed coffee station, Philz is all about creating a perfect cup of coffee, one cup at a time.

Phil, together with his son Jacob, didn’t want to stop there. They wanted to bring their particular approach to coffee to the masses. And this was about more than just a single retail location. Jacob knew that if Philz really wanted to scale, they needed to have a technology foundation that would seamlessly support their growth. So in 2010, Philz adopted NetSuite. After a recommendation from a friend and an evaluation of NetSuite, Philz made the move from QuickBooks(opens in new tab) to cloud-based NetSuite(opens in new tab). For Philz, it was a great fit, it matched the company’s current needs, but its all-in-one capabilities provided the foundation for future growth.

Philz has retail(opens in new tab), wholesale and online parts to its business and NetSuite provides the technology backbone for all of these elements. Additionally, Philz uses NetSuite for its manufacturing processes, trusting NetSuite and the cloud to manage the secret blends that Phil has taken years to perfect. Since adopting NetSuite, Philz has grown over 400%. Philz now has over 13 retail stores, and five more expected to launch before 2014 Philz also supplies coffee to FaceBook, Google, Twitter and Virgin America. Customers can also order directly from Philz Coffee(opens in new tab) for their favorite blends.

Philz is just starting its journey to provide coffee around the world, similarly NetSuite is on a similar journey to provide the Fortune 5 Million company an application to run their entire business. And just like Philz, who serves its coffee one cup at a time, so is the approach at NetSuite, bringing businesses to the cloud, one customer at a time.

-Ranga Bodla, Industry Marketing, NetSuite

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.