Strong Coffee, Stronger Strategy: The Death Wish Coffee Story
On June 28, 2018, Death Wish Coffee gathered for a celebration. The brand’s coffee had been packed for a care package headed to astronauts aboard the International Space Station, and a small crowd marked the moment while the company’s story kept growing. SHG was there too, making an introduction that would later turn into years of advisory work.
That moment was symbolic for a brand built on ambition. Death Wish Coffee, founded in 2012 by Michael Brown in Saratoga Springs, New York, positioned itself around a simple promise. It was the “World’s Strongest Coffee,” built from arabica and robusta beans, and it was sold with attitude.
But the path from a local shop to a national shelf rarely follows a straight line. For Death Wish, one of the sharpest turns came from a long-shot bet.
The Ad That Changed Everything
In 2015, Death Wish entered Intuit QuickBooks’ Small Business Big Game competition for a chance at a Super Bowl commercial. The company later described it as a moonshot that became a hinge point for everything that followed, after it beat a field of thousands and earned the Super Bowl 50 ad spot.
About a year and a half after the Super Bowl commercial aired, Brown was managing fast expansion and looking for help valuing the business and steering growth decisions with clearer data. Brown’s first task was straightforward. He wanted a valuation to set a baseline for an employee equity plan. He got that, and then some. SHG’s valuation became a working tool that helped translate momentum into a plan. Brown described it as getting “a lot more out of the valuation than just a number.”
Cory Martin, an SHG Managing Director, framed it the same way, saying he doesn’t treat valuation as “just a number,” but as a tool that supports growth choices. SHG’s work for Death Wish included market and peer comparisons and operational benchmarks that helped the team spot gaps and map a longer-term plan.
Finding The Real Asset
Around the same time, SHG’s work expanded into a strategic asset review, pushing the team to identify what truly separated Death Wish from other coffee brands. The answer was not only the product. SHG believed the company’s edge lay in its culture. They identified what they called a movement toward unapologetically bold branding, summed up as “Coffee with Attitude,” and a younger audience that treated coffee as identity as much as routine.
From there, the brand’s marketing leaned into attention plays that punched above their weight, including earning free airtime tied to Super Bowl 50 buzz and turning the space milestone into a lifestyle statement.
The throughline was consistency. A brand that promised strength and attitude kept showing up in places where people weren’t expecting a coffee company to land.
When Growth Creates Its Own Risks
Fast growth can be a gift and a stress test. Martin remembers Brown managing new hires, new leaders, and more complexity, with the concern that uncontrolled growth can create failure modes that feel sudden. The advisory work, then, wasn’t only about capturing upside. It was about keeping the company stable enough to keep scaling.
Over roughly three years of ongoing valuation and advisory work, Brown’s thinking evolved from measuring value to deciding how to fund the next stage. Eventually, SHG says Brown chose to pursue outside investment to take the company into another phase of growth and retained SHG to manage the process, from building the partner list to negotiating the final deal.
The Partner Search And The Nine-Week Sprint
In the fall of 2021, Death Wish Coffee completed a “highly accelerated” process that closed in about nine weeks. The result was a strategic investment partnership with TA Associates, a global private equity firm focused on growth. SHG assisted Brown in identifying a strategic partner, and Brown selected TA Associates to help guide the strategic and tactical growth of Death Wish Coffee.
For Death Wish, the decision was less about an “exit” in the traditional sense and more about what comes next. Certain transactions are better understood as pivots that keep building momentum rather than endings that cash out. In that sense, the TA partnership became the next platform, not the finish line.
What The Death Wish Story Shows
It’s easy to explain Death Wish Coffee’s rise as a sequence of stunts. A Super Bowl commercial. Coffee in space. Bold brand voice. Those pieces mattered, but their growth is more disciplined than it looks from the outside.
The company translated attention into operational growth, then translated growth into valuation clarity, and then used that clarity to choose the right kind of capital partner. It treated the brand as an asset that could be analyzed, articulated, and scaled, not just expressed. It also moved quickly when timing aligned, closing an investment partnership on a compressed schedule once the decision was made.
For a brand that built its name on intensity, the most interesting part of the story may be the quieter one. Behind the loud coffee and the big moments, there was a steady shift from impulse to strategy, guided by numbers, positioning, and a clear view of what made the company matter to customers.
Ready to get a clear understanding of your business value and next steps? Contact SHG to discuss a valuation, evaluation, and a plan that fits your goals.
