Hot Shot case study: the coffee shop that didn't need an agency

Denver's food editors have used his photos for years. Not one of them had met him.

When I emailed Westword's food editor about Jeff Fierberg's coffee shop, he wrote back with a confession. He'd put so many of Jeff's photographs in his articles over the years, and he'd never actually met the man. Could he come in for a coffee?

That's Jeff's problem in two lines. It might be yours too.

Jeff photographs Colorado's Michelin-starred kitchens; the Michelin Guide credits his pictures of Brutø and The Wolf's Tailor. He spends his working life making other people's food famous. In between, he and his wife, Sky Armstrong, run Hot Shot, a coffee shop on York Street in a dry cleaner that sat empty for 14 years. The menu changes city every few months. Drip is $3.50. Once a month the back hall fills with 40 to 60 people playing mahjong.

Nobody had written that up. The photographer was allways the one behind the camera. And a coffee shop doesn't have a PR budget. One of our US clients was paying $15,000 a month in retainers before they found us, which at Hot Shot prices is 4,286 cups of drip. Every month. Jeff would need to sell a lot of lattes.

We didn't pitch the coffee. We pitched Jeff, to the people who already knew his work without knowing his face. 33 emails, not 3,300. Nine went to journalists who had run his photographs or written about his work. Linnea Covington at DiningOut had used his shot of corn at The Wolf's Tailor with the Michelin results a month earlier. Another went to the Denver Post writer who had already reported a mahjong story from Hot Shot's back hall.

The date did the rest. Hot Shot's tenth menu, Hokkaido, started on Saturday 18 October: a miso brown butter latte, a cold brew with salted white chocolate foam, a yubari melon tonic. Try telling a food desk no to a yubari melon tonic.

I sent the first batch at lunchtime in the UK, which is 5:37 in the morning in Denver. Time zones are not my strong suit. Linnea said yes at 8:03 anyway, and DiningOut put Hot Shot in its Denver news. Westword's food editor wants his coffee with Jeff. KUVO wants him back in the studio in November. Three yeses, the first four days after we built the press kit, and nobody paid for a word of it.

If you're the person who makes everyone else look good, a photographer, a designer, a chef, the supplier nobody names, you're sitting on a better story than the thing you sell. You just can't see it from behind the camera.

That's what White Glove is for. About $3,300, once, and if nobody writes about you, you get it back.

Next time Westword runs one of Jeff's photographs, it might be one of him.