Quick Results
7.5x More Orders from customers after earning their first points
5.9x Higher Customer Lifetime Value for customers who redeem at least once
4.4% Higher Average Order Value among loyalty members
4 Tiers taking customers from Green Bean to Coffee Connoisseur
About 19grams
19grams is a Berlin-based specialty coffee roaster with four cafés across the city and a national e-commerce business shipping beans, equipment, and subscriptions across Germany and beyond. Founded with an uncompromising commitment to what they call "Bloody Good Coffee," the brand sources, roasts, and sells single-origin and blended coffees spanning espresso and filter profiles, alongside a growing catalog of brewing equipment, merchandise, and coffee courses. 19grams also runs one of Berlin's most active specialty coffee education programs, offering public cuppings, barista courses, latte art workshops, and roastery tours, making the brand as much a community hub for coffee knowledge as it is a retailer.
The Challenge
Specialty coffee is a category defined by knowledge and conviction. Customers who discover a roaster like 19grams have typically already made a deliberate decision to seek out quality over convenience, and once they find a roaster they trust, they have every reason to stay loyal. The challenge for 19grams wasn't standing out, it was capturing and rewarding the loyalty that was already there.
Without a structured program, the brand had no formal way to recognize its most committed customers, those who returned month after month for a new bag, signed up for a subscription, attended a cupping event, or worked their way through the course catalog. Every customer, whether a first-time visitor or a multi-year regular who had attended a dozen events, was treated the same at checkout. The brand's depth of community engagement had no corresponding loyalty structure to match it.
The Turning Point
19grams' team recognized that their community, customers passionate enough about coffee to attend roastery tours, buy grinders, and explore rare single-origin lots, represented exactly the kind of audience a richly layered loyalty program was designed for. These weren't casual shoppers. They were coffee enthusiasts who would respond to a program built around the language and culture of specialty coffee itself, not a generic points scheme.
The goal was to build something that reflected the brand's identity at every level: a program where even the terminology felt like it belonged to 19grams, and where the most loyal customers were rewarded not just with discounts but with access to the kind of experiences that money couldn't straightforwardly buy.
Why They Chose Leat
19grams chose Leat to build the 19grams Club because it could support a multi-tier points structure with escalating earning multipliers at each level, matching the brand's philosophy of rewarding deeper engagement with progressively better benefits. The platform's flexibility allowed 19grams to design a program where point earning accelerated the more a customer spent, giving serious coffee enthusiasts a genuine financial reason to consolidate their purchasing with 19grams rather than spreading it across multiple roasters.
Leat also made it possible to unify loyalty across both the online store and the four Berlin cafés, ensuring that a customer picking up a bag in-store at the Alexanderplatz roastery and a customer ordering online from another city were both contributing to the same membership and working toward the same rewards.
The Strategy
Step 1: Naming the Program in the Language of Specialty Coffee
19grams built its loyalty program around a single, instantly recognizable mechanic: points are called Kaffeebohnen — coffee beans. Every euro spent earns beans, and beans are exchanged for vouchers redeemable in the online store or at any of the four cafés. The naming decision was deliberate. Rather than calling the currency "points" or "credits," 19grams tied the program's language directly to the product itself, making the membership feel like a natural extension of the brand's coffee-first identity from the very first interaction.
Step 2: Building Four Tiers Around the Specialty Coffee Journey
The 19grams Club was structured around four levels, each named after a stage in the life of a specialty coffee bean. Green Bean is the entry tier, where new members receive a 10% welcome discount and earn 1 point per euro spent. Classic Roast unlocks at €100 in cumulative spend, raising the earning rate to 1.5 points per euro and adding early access to new coffees and a birthday gift. Single O opens at €250, bringing free shipping on all orders, event invitations including roastery tours, barista workshops, and cupping sessions, and a 2-point earning multiplier. Coffee Connoisseur, the top tier at €500 in spend, earns 2.5 points per euro and unlocks exclusive tasting events with 19grams' own roasters, along with surprise gifts included with every order.
The progression from Green Bean to Coffee Connoisseur maps naturally onto the journey of a customer deepening their relationship with specialty coffee, making the tier structure feel thematically coherent rather than arbitrary.
Step 3: Rewarding the Most Loyal Customers with Access, Not Just Discounts
At the top two tiers of the 19grams Club, the most valuable rewards are experiential rather than financial. Single O and Coffee Connoisseur members receive invitations to roastery tours, barista workshops, cupping sessions, and private tastings with 19grams' roasters, experiences that money cannot simply purchase and that give the brand's most committed customers a direct, personal connection to the craft behind the coffee they drink. This approach turned the loyalty program's highest tier into something that reinforced 19grams' identity as an education-first specialty roaster, rather than a discount-heavy retailer.
The Results
The 19grams Club has had a clear, measurable impact on customer purchasing behavior.
7.5x more orders completed by customers after earning their first points, compared to customers who have never earned any
5.9x higher customer lifetime value among customers who have redeemed points at least once
4.4% higher average order value among loyalty members compared to non-members
The order frequency result stands out in particular. A 7.5x increase in completed orders after a customer earns their first points suggests that the act of engaging with the 19grams Club, even just once, fundamentally changes a customer's purchasing relationship with the brand. In a category where customers could source specialty coffee from dozens of roasters, the program appears to give 19grams customers a clear reason to consolidate their buying in one place.
Key Takeaways
Loyalty program language can reinforce brand identity from the very first interaction.
By calling points "Kaffeebohnen," 19grams made the currency of its loyalty program feel native to the brand rather than borrowed from a generic template. In a category where product passion runs deep, this kind of consistency between brand identity and program mechanics makes membership feel like a natural extension of being a coffee enthusiast, not just a shopper.
Escalating point multipliers reward customers for going deeper.
Rather than offering every member the same earning rate, 19grams built a structure where the earning rate improves meaningfully at every tier, from 1 point per euro at Green Bean to 2.5 at Coffee Connoisseur. This gives frequent buyers a compounding financial incentive to keep purchasing with 19grams rather than spreading spend across multiple roasters.
Experiential rewards at the top tier protect premium positioning.
By reserving roastery tours, private tastings, and workshops with the roasting team for its most loyal members, 19grams made the program's highest level feel genuinely exclusive rather than simply a larger discount. For a specialty coffee brand built around education and craft, these experiences are more aligned with the brand's identity than any voucher could be.
