Meet the people behind The Fifth

Different experience, all invested in making The Fifth as good as it can be.

Black cup of UK specialty roasted coffee beans

It's been collaborative from the start

The Fifth has brought together people with backgrounds in digital, design, e-commerce, technology, marketing and PR, each contributing something different to the same idea. We also happen to sit at rather different points on the coffee spectrum, from serious aficionados to people who are only just discovering what all the fuss is about. We think that’s probably quite healthy for a platform designed to help everyone find better coffee.

Anthony

FOUNDER

Anthony founded The Fifth after wondering why discovering coffee from independent UK roasters still involved quite so much detective work. He’s also the founder of Seeded Digital, a search and digital consultancy, and has spent most of his career working with websites, search, content and digital strategy.

His coffee knowledge sits somewhere between enthusiastic drinker and somewhere short of where Josh is at, although the direction of travel is fairly clear. What began with grinding fresh coffee at home has developed into an increasing interest in espresso, grinders, pour-over and all the other things you discover you apparently need once you start paying attention to what’s in your cup.

The Fifth brings those two interests together - a fascination with how people discover things online and a growing fascination with really good coffee.

And props to Winston for the excellent flat white at Beans & Beats in Brixton.

Andy

CO-FOUNDER

Andy brings a wealth of corporate marketing experience to The Fifth and looks after much of the work that keeps things moving behind the scenes, from email and customer communications to the less visible parts of running and growing the business.

His relationship with coffee is slightly more complicated. He’s previously worked as a barista, despite not actually being much of a coffee drinker himself. We’re choosing to regard this as useful balance rather than a character flaw. We're working on him.

Ed

DESIGN

Ed is the founder of design consultancy Yazaroo and the person responsible for the visual and digital design language of The Fifth. His idea of treating the platform more like an archive or reference collection than a conventional online shop has shaped everything from the grid and typography to the way coffees are organised, compared and explored.

When the project started, Ed wasn’t really a coffee drinker either! Designing The Fifth appears to have changed that. He’s started drinking coffee, become increasingly interested in it and begun his own journey with Nespresso-compatible pods.

That, in turn, influenced us. If The Fifth is genuinely about helping people find their way into better coffee, there’s no reason everyone has to begin with a grinder and an espresso machine. Ed helped make the case for bringing speciality Nespresso-compatible pods onto the platform, giving people another way in. We’ll see where his coffee habit takes him next.

Josh getting the coffees in at WOMAD festival

Josh and Kate

PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT

Josh and Kate are the team behind The Glasshouse Project, the e-commerce agency responsible for turning the idea and Ed’s designs into the platform you’re using today. They were also there much earlier in the story, helping us arrive at the name The Fifth in the first place.

Kate brings a strong background in e-commerce management and leads much of the thinking around how the platform is scoped, specified and delivered. Josh is Head of Development at Glasshouse and takes care of the considerably more technical business of making all of that actually work.

Josh is also probably the biggest coffee aficionado in the team, so there was little danger of some of the finer details escaping his attention. Kate is closer to the beginning of her speciality coffee journey, grinding fresh at home and discovering more as she goes. Between them, they’ve brought both serious technical expertise and a genuine understanding of the experience we’re trying to create.

Anthony (Founder of The Fifth) with a flat white at Beans & Beats cafe in Brixton, London

Victoria & Angharad

Victoria and Angharad are the team at Apt Marketing and PR helping us introduce The Fifth to a much wider audience. They bring years of experience in PR and communications, along with the ideas, relationships and outside perspective that come from knowing how to find a good story and get it in front of the right people.

Their job isn’t simply to talk about The Fifth. There are brilliant independent roasters, fascinating people and an enormous amount happening in UK speciality coffee, and part of what we want to do is help more of those stories get heard.