vegaslivewithninon asked:
Who are you ...
As some of you may know, I am the unpaid social media marketing intern for the world’s best coffee company, the Awesome Coffee Club, which provides our 10,000+ members with the world’s best coffee and then donates 100% of our profit to charity.
TODAY, the Awesome Coffee Club’s new site launches with a much more extensive story page exploring how we work directly with farmers and small co-ops in Colombia to make such exceptional coffee, as well as new options for getting great coffee delivered to your home.
In the past three years, we’ve been able to donate over $5,000,000 to fight maternal and child mortality in impoverished communities through the awesome socks and coffee clubs. And we’re just getting started. Join us!
p.s. I am trying to figure out which social media sites actually drive coffee sales, so sign up through tumblr if you want me to think tumblr matters. :)
It’s complicated, vegaslivewithninon.
I am a coffee company. Specifically, I am the world’s best coffee company. We source incredible coffee beans, roast them perfectly, and send them to your house.
Best of all, the awesome coffee club donates 100% of its profit to charity–through this model, combined with our socks and our soap, we’ve been able to donate over $5,000,000 to fight child and maternal mortality.
But one thing corporations go to great lengths to hide is that they are actually made out of people. Like, when Wendy’s tweets, that is not actually a sentient version of the restaurant Wendy’s. It is actually a person or group of people who is being paid by Wendy’s.
And so in addition to being the awesome coffee club, I am also a human being, just like Wendy’s is made out of human beings. Specifically, I am a novelist and essayist and youtuber and tumblr veteran named John Green.
So sometimes I am John Green and sometimes I am a coffee company. I contain multitudes. I guess it’s possible that you feel a lot of stability in who you are, vegaslivewithninon, but I do not. I feel a distinct lack of stability.
apathbetweenthestars asked:
I just wanted to let you know that The Awesome Coffee Club's Octavia blend has ruined me for other coffee brands. I recently visited my mom and she regularly buys [insert Big Name Brand of coffee here]. While drinking it, I couldn't help but think how it wasn't as smooth, as rich, as delectable!
I started drinking Octavia more than a year ago, and now I don't think I could regularly drink anything else.
One of the reason that we don’t do a lot of advertising is that our customers are better advertisers than we are.
Last week, Johnson & Johnson agreed not to enforce their secondary patents on bedaquiline in most countries after a long public pressure campaign by TB activists around the world.
(A special shoutout to Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisilethe, the two women who led the charge to prevent the patent evergreening in India, which is the only reason generic bedaquiline is in production.)
But the problem of patent evergreening is everywhere–as this NYT story reports, Gilead intentionally denied people access to a drug they knew to be less toxic than alternatives because it wanted to extend its monopoly on HIV drugs for as long as possible.
Similarly, Johnson & Johnson has been intentionally denying people access to affordable bedaquiline, even though they knew they could make a profit even if they decreased the price by 65%.
What’s especially galling is that both these companies benefit tremendously from public investment (bedaquiline research was funded primarily by the public), and so we end up paying for it twice–once to develop it, and once to have it available to the sick.
This is infuriating, and it is resulting in the real impoverishment and death of so many people. How does it end? With better governance and regulation. In this respect, India can be a model for us–their courts have done a much better job than U.S. ones of determining what really deserves to be patented and for how long. I’m hopeful that we can learn from the, but disgusted by this ongoing horror.
countingwhales asked:
dear Mr intern,
i have just received my awesome socks (FOR THE FIRST TIME) and i would like to know what makes them so soft because THEY ARE SO GOOD?? thank you for making them soft and not scratchy mr intern!!
It is hard to explain to people via e-commerce that we are not kidding when we say, “we make the best socks designed by independent artists and donate all the profit to charity,” that we actually mean they are the BEST SOCKS.
Similarly hard to explain that when we say, “Awesome coffee is the best coffee, and we donate all the profit to charity,” that we actually mean we make the BEST COFFEE.
This is one of the challenges of marketing. Also, we don’t really have a marketing department. It’s just me and Hank.
captain-acab asked:
Hello, acclaimed YA author John Green! I have a question about the coffee. (Coffee is one of my favorite tastes)
As I understand it, you "are" the company inasmuch as you are marketing for it, not like you literally own or run it, is that approximately correct? So I don't know how much executive influence you wield within the corporation, but I'd like to run this by you: Fair Trade coffee is great for uplifting the local economy, but it can still be (and unfortunately, often is) grown unsustainably. I didn't see much in the way of specific environmental claims on Awesome Coffee's site... What do you think about Awesome Coffee sourcing coffee that meets environmental certification reqs, like Shade Grown or Bird-Friendly? Is this something the company might be interested in pursuing?
- Thank you for your question.
- My official position is temporary unpaid CEO and social media marketing intern of the awesome coffee club. (This means I do very little of the actual work, which is in keeping with both interns and CEOs.)
- Coffee supply chains are very complex! And environmental impact is very complex! And it turns out that you can kind of SAY anything on your coffee packaging. You can say it’s fair trade without carefully defining that term, or environmentally sustainable or bird friendly without carefully defining that term.
There are folks who are trying to establish standards on these fronts, but it varies so much from community to community. Is it better to shade-grow coffee in extant forests, or better to increase yields on land that has been coffee trees for decades? The answer to that question may be different in Indonesia than in Colombia. So what we’ve tried to do is work with farmers and small co-ops that maintain and own longstanding well-established coffee groves.
But just to be clear, no coffee is carbon-neutral or eco-neutral. It’s a form of consumption, just like corn and wheat, which are often grown in deforested regions of the U.S. But I think our partners at Sucafina are doing a good job genuinely working to minimize the impact that Awesome Coffee has on the environment, while maximizing the impact it has on the farmers we work with.
a-b-c-andy asked:
Did you ask for a meme?
The memes y'all make are so much better than the memes I made. Get Awesome Coffee. It’s exceptionally good coffee–ethically sourced, perfectly roasted, and delivered fresh to your door.