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Great to see that all of these got sold! The numbers in this story don't exactly line up, in a way that tells a fun and clearly stressful story: (The cases hav
by timerol 4y ago
Great to see that all of these got sold!
The numbers in this story don't exactly line up, in a way that tells a fun and clearly stressful story: (The cases have 6 bags each.)
The intro to the blog post mentions 34k bags of coffee actually made. The initial order was thought to be 6k bags of coffee, but was actually 6k cases = 36k bags of coffee. So it looks like some got sold off between the delivery fiasco and the blog post. Later in the blog post it's mentioned as approximately 30k bags sold for half off + free shipping.
It looks like at time of writing there are $5277 in donations at $50/case, so 630 bags from the fundraiser. The Fire Sale has sold out at 24k bags, short of their original 30k bag goal. (Edit: They sold out of all of the caffeinated coffee, not all of the decaf.) They raised between $173k (all $7 bags + donations) and $197k (all $8 bags + donations), not counting the substantial shipping costs for 4k cases of coffee.
The debt likely to be paid off first is $60k of personal credit cards, $65k of business credit cards, and $45k of personal loans (there's a social cost to keeping these after such a successful fundraiser). $170k total here, leaving the $66k of other debt to be paid off more gradually.
(Edit: They only have decaf left from the sale coffees. The 4k bags not put up for sale, and some remaining decaf, are all of their excess inventory. Ignore following paragraph) ~~I'm guessing that they chose to keep the extra inventory after seeing the wild and immediate success of the sale. Knowing that they can pay off their worst debt, and getting a ton of new customers as well, they'd rather have the extra 6k bags around to sell at normal prices. It's also possible that they sold out of one type of coffee first, and that helped them decide to shut down the sale, rather than keeping it updated with the different varieties still in stock.~~
Modest Coffee now seems poised to be successful. Extra stock, no longer extra warehousing space needed, exposure to a ton of new customers, and their worst debts paid. I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years.
- JimtheCoder 4y ago"I wouldn't be surprised if they look back on this fiasco as their biggest success in a few years." Wouldn't that imply that they would be doing even worse in the future?
- timerol 4y agoI didn't mean it as the biggest success in terms of revenue or profit. I meant that this fiasco would set them up for such natural and smooth future growth that in a few years, when looking back, they would tell the story of Modest Coffee with "our current success started because of a fiasco from a misunderstood contract".
- maxerickson 4y agoThe leftover bags are decaffeinated.
- carapace 4y agoIf they can't move the decaf it would make good mushroom growth medium.
- mattkrause 4y agoThis! FTA: "All of the bags of caffeinated coffees sold out. That’s approximately 24,000 bags of coffee."
- timerol 4y agoThanks! I updated my comment at a few points. The numbers still don't quite add, given 24k bags sold + 634 cases of decaf still for sale (= 3804 bags) is still under the initial 30k bags. But I suppose 2k bags of decaf could have easily sold in the meantime.
- satvikpendem 4y agoAnd I'm glad for that, I only drink decaf, black. No, I don't hate myself, I just have a strong caffeine sensitivity.
- whoopdeepoo 4y agoI am guessing the reason this coffee went fast is because it was a good price and the good sob story. Hard to imagine they can continue to pull that off. Fool me once yada yada
- zuppy 4y agoI wouldn’t be that sure about the price being good, if we’re talking about specialty coffee, which is a totally different kind of beast than the supermarket coffee. It’s almost a half a year old coffee (time since roast), a great part of the flavor has been already lost. We also don’t know how it has been stored, temperature will also affect the quality. here’s a very deeply technical explanation of this, right from the source (SCA): https://sca.coffee/sca-news/podcast/81/the-science-of-coffee-freshness-samo-smrke-expo-lectures-2019 https://sca.coffee/sca-news/podcast/81/the-science-of-coffee... just a small part: “A lot of volatile compounds that escape from coffee after roasting is about 1000 compounds identified in coffee and out of those, 50 compounds are important for the aroma of coffee. […] So, when we look after one month some of the compounds like this one Methanethiol ends up at less than 10% of what we had in the fresh coffee, but also others they behave very differently. This is means that the relative composition of the coffee changes with time. ” there’s a lot more fun stuff in there for the coffee enthusiasts.
- fabian2k 4y agoThe kind of people that buy specialty coffee would also tend to pay attention to roast dates and have very different expectations compared to people that buy coffee in a supermarket. Half a year is a lot for this audience. When you buy from a roaster directly something like roasted a week ago would be more like the typical age. So I'm a bit surprised, I would have expected this audience to be much pickier about the age of the coffee.
- lbotos 4y agoI suspect that the people buying this coffee are either: 1. Taking the "loss" to support a small business 2. Normies who feel like they are getting a deal on "Specialty coffee" that they normally wouldn't buy. Some people can't pass up a deal (esp a feel good one!)