Lawrence’s Yippee Café ships their high quality coffee right to your door

Yippee Café owner Mike Archibald is keeping nationwide customers caffeinated with his coffee subscription business. // Courtesy Archibald

Yippee Café owner Mike Archibald is keeping nationwide customers caffeinated with his coffee subscription business.

In July, four months into adjusting to pandemic life, Mike Archibald started to wonder how people were faring with no longer being able to enter cafés like they used to.

“COVID-10 and other stuff got me thinking more creatively about how I want to spend my time and what things make me happy,” Archibald says. “I started thinking about people being at home and [their] options, like how are people getting their coffee? What creative ways can we sell people coffee?”

This curiosity was one of the driving forces that prompted him to open Yippee Café, a coffee subscription company based out of Lawrence. Yippee Café offers monthly subscriptions at three different levels, sending a different coffee each month to doors across the country.

Production for the company out of its New York Street warehouse means two days of roasting, shipping, and packaging all during the third week of each month.  When he is not getting coffee to customers, Archibald is active on the company’s Instagram, seeing customers post about receiving their bags for the month, hosting brew tutorials on Mondays, and answering customer questions on Wednesdays.

“I just want to be able to enjoy doing goofy things with folks on the internet and getting to create this community of people who have signed up,” Archibald says.

Archibald has worked in coffee since 2012. He moved to Kansas with his wife two and a half years ago from Denver and began roasting and running the warehouse for Alchemy Coffee and Bake House as a wholesale partner. He realized his idea for Yippee Café could work after he successfully independently sold coffee through Instagram from one of Alchemy’s Kansas City importers and donated the proceeds to nonprofit organization Skate Like A Girl.

Now Yippee Café uses that same business model.

“I’m always looking and kind of scheming up things I want to do, because I like to think creatively about business in general,” Archibald says. “I was like, ‘What if I did something similar to this?And that’s what Yippee (Café) ended up being. Instead of selling it personally, I created Yippee and instead of [keeping] all the profits, I give $2 from every subscription to different nonprofits.”

The eccentric name of the company comes from Archibald’s appreciation for country music.

“I like the range and the palette country music has,” Archibald says. “As you peel away history, it’s really rich and I think it matches the diversity of the product I’m selling.”

Six months into operating his first project of his own, Archibald is happy to see people enjoying it.

“I understand that my friends get the jokes and the humor and the art, but if it’s total strangers who don’t know me and they’re willing to sign up, that’s wild to me,” Archibald says. “I think it’s really rad.”