Perk Coffee
Paul Berthelsen had 25 years of farming behind him and no tech background at all. We built the WooCommerce subscription store his roast-to-order coffee business runs on, now Southeast Asia's largest online coffee subscription.
A WooCommerce build for a founder with no tech background that has carried Perk Coffee from its first orders to 10,000+ subscribers and expansion into Malaysia and Hong Kong.
What we were solving
Paul Berthelsen came to coffee the long way round. After years in law and finance, he spent over a decade farming in Kenya before moving to Singapore and founding Perk Coffee in 2016 with his wife Serena. The idea was simple and stubborn: coffee roasted to order in Singapore and delivered within 48 hours of roasting, because freshness is the one thing supermarket beans can't give you.
The business model made the website the whole company. Perk Coffee had no cafe and no retail shelf. Every order, delivery and payment would run through the store, and the founders wanted subscriptions at the centre: choose your coffee, quantity and frequency, then change any of it whenever you like. That's a harder problem than a cart and a checkout, and in 2016 subscription coffee barely existed in Southeast Asia.
Paul also had, in his own words, no tech background and no experience in ecommerce. He needed a partner who could build the store, then stay around while the business grew.
How we tackled it
Subscriptions first, not bolted on
Plenty of stores add a subscribe button as an afterthought. Perk Coffee needed the opposite: a store designed around recurring revenue, with one-off purchases as the secondary path. We built the platform on WordPress and WooCommerce with subscriptions and payment processing at the core, so customers could set a delivery rhythm, swap coffees, pause or change quantities without emailing anyone. Every change a customer can make themselves is a cancellation avoided and a support ticket that never arrives.
WooCommerce was the right call for a bootstrapped startup. No platform fees scaling with revenue, full ownership of customer data, and room to shape the checkout and product pages around how people buy coffee (by roast, by format, by frequency) rather than around a template's assumptions.
A store the founders could run
The build sat on the Genesis framework, chosen for speed and longevity rather than fashion. Product pages, bundles and content all live in the same WordPress admin, so the team could add new formats over the years (whole beans, drip bags, pods, brewing equipment, gift sets) without a developer in the loop.
We stayed on after launch through a Website Care plan, handling weekly maintenance, updates and monitoring from 2017 onwards. When the website is the entire revenue channel, that care is the difference between a quiet Tuesday and a day of lost orders.
What we delivered
Perk Coffee now describes itself as Southeast Asia's largest online coffee subscription startup, and it got there bootstrapped, with no funding rounds propping up the numbers. The store carried the business through every stage: the first customers, expansion into Malaysia in 2018 and Hong Kong in 2020, and the scaling of a model where roughly 80% of revenue comes from subscriptions. A decade on, perkcoffee.co looks different but runs on the foundation we laid: WooCommerce with WooCommerce Subscriptions first, then custom subscription software built on top of it.
What we learned
When the website is the business, architecture decisions are business decisions. Choosing WooCommerce over a hosted platform meant Perk Coffee kept its margins and its customer relationships as it scaled. In a subscription model the economics live in retention, so that ownership matters more than usual.
Boring reliability compounds. There was no dramatic relaunch in this story and no rescue project. There was a sound build, a care plan, and a decade of a store quietly taking orders while the roaster ran. The drama is in all the downtime that never happened.
Impact & outcomes
active subscribers by 2020, up from the first 1,000 in year one
orders fulfilled for 100,000+ customers across Southeast Asia
average from more than 5,000 customer reviews
Today, we have a thriving subscription service with over 1,000 active subscribers and we're now expanding into Malaysia.
