Chamberlain Coffee
Emma Chamberlain filmed herself drinking coffee for two years, then turned that audience into a $22 million brand on the shelves of Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, with cafes in Los Angeles and a matcha that keeps selling out.
Emma Chamberlain built a coffee brand out of a habit. She filmed herself making iced coffee in nearly every YouTube video from the time she was 16, and by 19 she had turned that on-camera obsession into Chamberlain Coffee, a company that cleared nearly $22 million in revenue in 2024 and sits on the shelves of Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Erewhon. The brand runs two cafes in Los Angeles and sells a ceremonial-grade matcha that has sold out five separate times.
Chamberlain is the founder and co-CEO, and instead of pulling money out of the company, she put her own in, joining a 2023 funding round personally. Her wealth, estimated somewhere between $12 million and $30 million, still comes mostly from her creator career, her YouTube channel and her podcast, rather than the coffee brand itself. Chamberlain Coffee is the rare business you can watch learn to stand up in real time: a real product, in real retail, still working out how to make money.
At a glance:
| Founded | December 2019 (DTC launch); relaunched with a full team in 2020 |
| Founder | Emma Chamberlain (Founder, Co-CEO) |
| Co-CEO | Gustav Langberg Hossy (partner at lead investor Blazar Capital; COO in 2020, co-CEO in August 2024) |
| Former CEO | Christopher Gallant (2021–2024; MIT Sloan MBA; 15+ years in beverages) |
| Revenue | ~$22M (2024), $19M (2023), projected $33M (2025, unconfirmed) |
| Valuation | ~$20M |
| Total funding | ~$20M across 4 rounds, all led by Blazar Capital |
| Sold at | chamberlaincoffee.com, Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, Amazon; 6,000+ retail locations; cafes in Century City and Venice, Los Angeles |
| Prices | Coffee bags ~$16; matcha $22–23; canned lattes $2.98–3.50; cafe lattes $4.25–$7 |
The Story
Coffee was the whole channel
Chamberlain started posting on YouTube in 2017 at 16, and coffee became her signature almost by accident. She made iced coffee on camera, talked about it, drank it through every vlog, until her audience linked her to it completely. “I was super into making simple iced coffee recipes, and my love for coffee definitely didn’t go unnoticed,” she later wrote on the brand’s site. When she launched Chamberlain Coffee in December 2019 with a family blend cold brew, she was not introducing a product to strangers. She was giving a name to something millions of people had already watched her love.
Even with more than nine million subscribers, a merch line, and a book deal at 19, the coffee did not take off overnight. As she told Refinery29 in 2020, the launch “wasn’t an instant home run.”
The $60 scam heard round YouTube
The first crisis was the price. A 30-pack of steeped cold brew bags sold for $60, and because a cup took three bags, fans calculated a cost of roughly $6 a serving and turned on it. BuzzFeed ran the story under the headline “YouTuber Emma Chamberlain Is Selling Coffee Packets For $60 That Fans Are Calling A ‘Scam.’” Chamberlain did not respond publicly, and the pricing was reworked as the lineup expanded past those original bags. The lesson arrived early: the same audience that built the brand would also be its most exacting critic.
Blazar builds the company around her
In July 2020, Blazar Capital became the brand’s first investor, and Gustav Hossy, a co-owner of the European fund who had previously run the Danish eyewear brand Christopher Cloos, came on as chief operating officer. Blazar did not sit back after the check cleared. The fund installed an operating team, relaunched the brand top to bottom, and in fall 2021 hired Christopher Gallant, an MIT Sloan MBA with more than 15 years in beverages, as CEO. What began as one teenager’s side project became a venture-backed company with professional operators and a mandate to grow.
Emma takes the co-CEO seat
In August 2024, Chamberlain and Hossy were named co-CEOs, and Gallant, who had led the company since 2021, moved on. Chamberlain described the promotion as something she had grown into, telling Forbes she was now ready to “co-run this company in a way I was not ready for prior.” The candor was striking for a founder stepping into the top job at a brand that carries her own name, and it fit a pattern: she has also compared building the business to a marriage, crying included.
The Strategy
Fourth-wave coffee for Gen Z
Former CEO Christopher Gallant placed Chamberlain Coffee in what he called “fourth wave” coffee, higher quality than a mass chain like Starbucks, but without the ritual and gatekeeping of a third-wave roaster like Blue Bottle. He described the target customer as someone who wants “super high quality, but they want it without the pretentiousness and snobbery.” That positioning fits Gen Z coffee culture precisely, where taste standards are high and snobbery is out of fashion.
Into Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods
Chamberlain Coffee moved deliberately from its own website into national retail, reaching more than 375 Target stores in 2023, launching a Walmart-exclusive canned line the same year, and spreading into Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Erewhon. By 2026 the brand was in more than 6,000 retail locations. That kind of shelf presence is what separates a creator brand that lives and dies on its founder’s posts from a real consumer packaged goods company, and reaching it in under five years is genuinely fast for a brand that started as a YouTube tie-in.
The canned-coffee misfire
The ready-to-drink cans were supposed to be the growth engine, and the first version stumbled. Launched in April 2023 with a base of almond milk and coconut cream, the cans drew heavy criticism for a texture reviewers called slimy. Rather than defend it, the company pulled the formula and relaunched in December 2023 with an oat milk base, acknowledging the miss directly. “Our original RTD recipe was less sweet and made with almond and coconut milk,” Chamberlain said at the reformulated launch, framing oat milk as the sweeter option customers had asked for. The fix worked, but the product had lost months of goodwill during a critical retail push.
Matcha becomes the hit
While the cans struggled, matcha turned into the brand’s standout. The ceremonial-grade Japanese matcha, priced at $22 to $23, has sold out five separate times on the DTC site, a milestone the brand now prints on the product page itself. Matcha carries the kind of margin and repeat purchase behavior that canned lattes lack, and it landed right as Gen Z pushed the category into double-digit annual growth.
Betting on cafes
Chamberlain Coffee opened its first cafe at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles in January 2025, and it logged more than 30,000 transactions in its opening stretch, with lines out the door. A larger standalone location on Abbot Kinney in Venice followed in April 2026, designed around an Italian theme with tiramisu lattes and olive oil coffee. Owned cafes give the brand what a shelf cannot: control of the experience, the full retail margin, and a physical place where the brand exists as somewhere you go, not just something you buy.
The Marketing
The audience was already built
Most consumer brands spend years and millions buying their way to awareness. Chamberlain launched into an audience of roughly 12 million YouTube subscribers who already associated her with coffee, which meant her launch-day cost to acquire a customer was close to nothing. The product never had to introduce itself, because the founder had done that on camera, for free, across two years of videos. That is the entire logic of the creator-brand model: the content comes first, the audience second, and the product turns an existing relationship into revenue.
Give every blend a face
In 2020, the brand swapped its plain early packaging for a cast of cartoon animals, one per blend: Social Dog, Early Bird, Careless Cat, Night Owl, and Fancy Mouse. Where specialty roasters signal seriousness with blank bags and origin jargon, Chamberlain Coffee went warm and playful, matching the unpolished, friendly tone that made its founder’s videos work in the first place. The characters turned a commodity into something collectible and gave the brand a personality that reads as distinctly its own next to legacy coffee names.
The founder never stops publishing
The brand’s most durable marketing asset is that Emma keeps making things. Between her YouTube channel and her podcast, she generates constant cultural presence that keeps Chamberlain Coffee in front of exactly the right audience without a media buy. One trade outlet described the company as “growing up with its founder,” which is the strategy in plain terms: as long as she keeps creating, the brand keeps surfacing, and its marketing costs stay a fraction of what a founder-less competitor would have to spend.
The Numbers
| Year | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2023 | $19M |
| 2024 | ~$22M (operated at a loss) |
| 2025 (projected) | $33M (unconfirmed) |
Funding: Chamberlain Coffee has raised roughly $20 million across four rounds, all led by Blazar Capital, from a $1 million seed in July 2020 through a $4.6 million Series A-III in May 2024, with UTA and Chamberlain herself joining later rounds. Public estimates of the total range from about $19.6 million to $25.6 million.
Valuation: The company’s valuation sits at approximately $20 million, roughly in line with what it has raised, which tells you the brand has not yet generated the returns that would lift its worth well above its funding base.
Profitability: Chamberlain Coffee operated at a loss in 2024 despite clearing nearly $22 million in sales, finishing just short of its own forecast. A leaked 2025 pitch deck projected a jump to $33 million and a “strong path to profitability by 2026,” though the $33 million figure has not been confirmed as reached. The brand is leaning into higher-margin channels, cafes and DTC matcha, to close the gap.
Ownership: Co-CEO Gustav Hossy is also a partner at Blazar Capital, the lead investor in every round the company has raised, which means the same firm sits on both sides of the table when Chamberlain Coffee raises money. The structure has kept the brand funded through lean years while concentrating control in a way worth understanding before you read the growth story as a pure founder win.
Controversies
”$60 coffee scam” (December 2019)
The launch product, a 30-pack of steeped cold brew bags at $60, worked out to about $6 a cup because each serving needed three bags, and fans found that excessive for what amounted to pour-over sachets. BuzzFeed covered the backlash under a headline calling it a scam, the criticism spread on social media, and Chamberlain said nothing publicly. The pricing was restructured as the line grew, but the episode set the tone for a brand whose most devoted audience is also its toughest.
Ready-to-drink reformulation (2023)
The brand’s first canned lattes, made with almond milk and coconut cream, shipped in April 2023 with a texture consumers panned as slimy. The company reformulated with an oat milk base by December 2023 and said so plainly, positioning the new version as the sweeter recipe customers wanted. The eight-month gap landed during a major retail expansion, exactly when the Walmart-exclusive line was meant to prove the brand could win on mass shelves.
Leaked pitch deck (2025)
In early 2025, a journalist published internal Chamberlain Coffee documents that revealed the 2024 operating loss and the difficulty the company faced raising more money, with one approached investor reportedly calling the outreach “desperate.” The leak offered a rare, unvarnished look at the finances behind a brand that had projected confidence in public, and it put hard numbers to a story the company had mostly told in growth headlines.
What You Can Learn
An audience gets you the first sale, not the whole business. Chamberlain launched to roughly 12 million subscribers and still operated at a loss five years later. Attention converts into trial, not automatically into repeat purchases, healthy margins, or operational muscle, and closing that gap is the actual work of building a consumer brand.
Own a product mistake out loud. When the first cans flopped, the brand pulled the formula, reformulated, and said why. For anyone shipping a physical product, how fast and how honestly you fix version one matters more than whether version one was perfect.
Distribution and profit are two different wins. Chamberlain Coffee scaled into thousands of stores and still lost money, because every new door adds sales and cost at the same time. Reach without unit economics is a trap, and the brands that last learn to grow and to earn on each unit at once.
Understand your cap table before you celebrate the raise. When your lead investor’s partner becomes your co-CEO, funding and control fuse together. It can keep a company alive through hard years, and it also means the person across the negotiating table is the person sitting beside you, which is worth knowing going in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Chamberlain Coffee?
Emma Chamberlain, the YouTuber and podcast host, founded the brand in December 2019 at age 19. She serves as co-CEO alongside Gustav Langberg Hossy, who joined as COO in 2020 and became co-CEO in August 2024.
Who owns Chamberlain Coffee?
Emma Chamberlain is the founder and co-CEO, and Blazar Capital, the European fund co-owned by co-CEO Gustav Hossy, has led all four funding rounds. UTA and Chamberlain herself participated in later rounds, and she reinvested her own money in 2023.
When was Chamberlain Coffee founded?
The brand launched as a direct-to-consumer site in December 2019 with steeped cold brew bags. It relaunched in 2020 with a full operating team after Blazar Capital’s $1 million seed investment and Gustav Hossy’s arrival as COO.
What is Chamberlain Coffee’s valuation?
The company was valued at approximately $20 million as of 2025, roughly equal to the $20 million it has raised across four rounds.
How much revenue does Chamberlain Coffee make?
The brand cleared nearly $22 million in revenue in 2024, up 14% from $19 million in 2023. A leaked pitch deck projected $33 million for 2025, though that figure has not been confirmed as achieved.
Is Chamberlain Coffee profitable?
Not yet. The company operated at a loss in 2024 despite $22 million in sales, and internal documents projected a “strong path to profitability by 2026,” helped by a shift toward higher-margin cafes and direct-to-consumer matcha.
What is Emma Chamberlain’s net worth?
Estimates range from roughly $12 million to $30 million, drawn from her YouTube channel, her “Anything Goes” podcast, and her equity in Chamberlain Coffee. Most of it comes from her media career rather than the coffee brand.
What happened with the Chamberlain Coffee cans?
The first canned lattes launched in April 2023 with almond milk and coconut cream and were criticized for a slimy texture. The brand reformulated with an oat milk base by December 2023 and marketed it as the sweeter recipe customers had requested.
Where can you buy Chamberlain Coffee?
At chamberlaincoffee.com and in more than 6,000 stores including Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, and Amazon, plus two cafes in Los Angeles, one at Westfield Century City and one on Abbot Kinney in Venice.
What is Chamberlain Coffee best known for?
Its ceremonial-grade matcha, which has sold out five separate times, and its animal-character blends like Social Dog and Early Bird. The brand is also one of the earliest examples of a major consumer product built directly from a YouTube creator’s audience.
Sources
- Sprudge, “Internal Documents Don’t Paint a Rosy Picture of Chamberlain Coffee,” 2025. 2024 revenue of nearly $22 million, up 14% from $19 million, and the operating loss.
- Business Insider, “Leaked Pitch Deck Reveals How Emma Chamberlain Planned to Grow Her Coffee Brand to $33M,” March 2025. 2025 revenue projection and path-to-profitability language.
- Forbes, “YouTuber Emma Chamberlain Takes the Helm as Co-CEO at Chamberlain Coffee,” August 2024. Co-CEO appointment, Gallant’s departure, and Emma’s quote.
- World Coffee Portal, “Influencer Emma Chamberlain Assumes Co-CEO Role at Chamberlain Coffee,” 2024. Hossy’s Blazar ownership and lead-investor role.
- Refinery29, “How Emma Chamberlain Turned a Coffee Order Into a Brand,” September 2020. Early struggles, “not an instant home run,” and founder background.
- BuzzFeed News, “YouTuber Emma Chamberlain Is Selling Coffee Packets for $60,” 2020. Launch pricing backlash.
- PR Newswire, “Answering Popular Demand, Chamberlain Coffee Launches Ready to Drink Oatmilk Lattes,” December 2023. The oat milk reformulation and Emma’s note on the original almond and coconut recipe.
- Tasting Table, “Everything You Need to Know About Chamberlain Coffee”. Blend characters Social Dog, Early Bird, Careless Cat, Night Owl, and Fancy Mouse.
- LAmag, “Abbot Kinney Welcomes Chamberlain Coffee,” 2026. 6,000+ retail locations and the Century City and Venice cafes.
- Yo! Venice!, “Chamberlain Coffee Pays Homage to Italy with New Venice Beach Cafe,” April 2026. Venice cafe opening, Italian theme, and menu.
- Like and Subscribe / The Ankler, “Inside Emma Chamberlain’s Coffee Empire,” 2025. Century City cafe transactions and expansion plans.
- CB Insights, “Chamberlain Coffee Financials”. Funding rounds and the Series A-III of $4.61 million in May 2024.