At the 2009 annual meeting of shareholders, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Coffee Company, said this: “One of the things I recently read is that Starbucks Coffee Co. is not cool any more. I’ve been here 27 years, we have never set out to be cool. We don’t want to be cool, we want to be relevant…”
Just for this one blog entry, I want to take “relevant” and put it on the back-burner and have a little fun with cool Starbucks schwag. All I am going to do is share with you a few of my favorite Starbucks things which might be very cool to me, but dorky to the rest of the world. And now for a Starbucks schwag tour:
**The lunch box:
In September 2008, I had a tour of the Starbucks headquarters which included an excursion to the partner store. While there, I picked up this lunch box, which still a year later, I absolutely love. For a little larger pic of the front of the lunch box, click here. The bottom of the lunch box has the url on it starbuckscoffeegear.com, so perhaps some of you can get one of these too (though you have to be a Starbucks partner to log in on that site. Since, I cannot log in to that site, I do not know if the lunchboxes are currently available through it). For a pic of the bottom of the box, click here.
**The ugly orange coffee mug:
In the very early 1990s I can remember walking into my local OakTree neighborhood Starbucks, and seeing some orange coffee mugs for sale with a gold logo. I can remember thinking, “oh my god those are ugly, who would ever buy that?” I went back to the mug several times, picking it up, putting it back on the shelf, tempted to buy it just because I thought it was such a hideous mug that it was calling out to me. Of course, in 1991 – 1992 I simply didn’t realize that Starbucks would be a big company, and never once occured to me that I should buy things and hold on to them. So mostly during this era of Starbucks, I didn’t buy much and I didn’t hold on to much, which I now regret. Years later, in about 2006 or maybe 2007, I was browsing e-bay and saw an orange coffee mug for sale, and of course I said, “Holy Verona Batman!! It’s the same damn ugly orange coffee mug.” I snatched up the mug from ebay (paying four times what it would’ve cost me to buy it in 1991), and here is a thumbnail of it:
One thing that is remarkable about the coffee mug is that it uses the Starbucks logo that was used between 1987 and 1992, and in my opinion is the rarest of the logos to find on anything. It is also the logo that I am personally the most sentimental about because it represents the era when I first discovered Starbucks. For a complete discussion of the evolution of the Starbucks logo, click here. For a larger pic of the orange coffee mug, click here.
On the topic of Starbucks coffee mugs, there are so many to talk about that I think a person could have an entire blog just on their mugs. I especially like the series of mugs that featured the coffee postage stamps, but don’t have any photos of those to share at this time (and I only have a few of them). One mug that I particularly like has a nice stylized Siren on it, but oddly the mug does not say the word “Starbucks” anywhere on it. The logo on the mug is the same logo featured on the green splash sticks in the stores. Here is a thumbnail of the mug: For a larger pic of this mug, click here.
**Starbucks related t-shirts:
I have a couple of t-shirts that I especially like because of the logos they feature. I have a Starbucks V2V “Do Good-er” t-shirt given to me by an SSC partner, but no photo of it to show off here. At 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea they sell logo t-shirts with their logo on them and so of course I picked up one of those right away. Click here for a pic of the 15th Avenue Coffee t-shirt. Something I’m even more sentimental about is my Clover coffee t-shirt. Big thank yous to the Starbucks partner who got one for me! For pic of the Clover coffee t-shirt, click here. I realize there have been a million Starbucks t-shirts and I only have a like 3 of them. I’ve seen baristas wearing Vivanno t-shirts, Sorbetto t-shirts, t-shirts with sign-language hands on them … There are a lot of Starbucks t-shirts!
By the way, I would love to get my hands on a Sorbetto t-shirt for my collection, if anyone should happen to know how I could best do that.
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Please feel free to post in the comments anything about your favorite Starbucks collectibles, or anything else related to this blog or Starbucks. This blog is really quite new and so I am very open to suggestions and ideas about topics, what works and what doesn’t, etc …
Thank you to Larry Aldrich of Seattle Custom Framing for taking all of the photographs featured in this blog entry.
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Also don’t miss the Starbucks Gossip blog run by Webmaster-Jim! http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com – I don’t think I can compete with him!
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Love this schwag! And I have to say, the photos are great! Kudos to Larry of Seattle Custom Framing.
I’ve always liked the original Starbucks siren and I found out recently while researching sirens that the first sirens from Greek mythology (Homer’s Odyssey) were not in fact mermaid-like creatures, but ladies with bird bodies like harpys. I think the mermaid ones (which seem to have showed up later in post-classical mythology) are prettier!
Hey Melody – Great website and great post.
I love that lunch box – probably even more so now that the new coffee bags no longer contain the stickers…call me sentimental, but the stickers always were a part of the Starbucks Experience for me.
Hope all is well.
I love collecting the mugs! And the occasional tumbler. Wish there was some kind of “Starbucks Guide to Mugs” out there.
Hey!
Addicted greetings from Germany 😉
I’m a hopeless, lost and eternal Starbucks lover!
My vice are city mugs; I have collected more than 80 so far, and I’m working on getting more. In my apartment special shelves for them are kinda dominating 😉
If somebody wants a mug from Nuremberg and/or Germany … I would love to exchange to enlarge my collection 😀
I collect old Starbucks cards either given to me by customers who are throwing them out or ones that i put five bucks on and then use. I put business card magnets on the back of them, and put them on my fridge. I have the Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, and cards from as far back as 2003. I also collect Barista Bears.
The box is on the coffeegear site, both alone (like $15 or so maybe?) and as part of a “boxed” set with a shirt and tons of other stuff for like $30
You forgot to mention collecting Howard’s autograph! : ]
Hi! Any idea of how much the “Ugly orange mug” is worth??? And also is it considered quite rare? Your posting about it is the first one I’ve found. I would appreciate any info you could give me on it and any other ways to research it’s value. Thanks in advance!
Hello Rita! Looks like you’ve found one of my oldest threads! I started this blog 9/9/09. I generally say that the value of an item is what people will pay for it. Ebay is a good way to gauge that. However, anything with the 1987 to 1992 era logo (like this orange mug) is probably worth a little more than many other Starbucks items. As I recall, I bought the orange mug for about $30 in 2009. Browsing through ebay, it looks like there might be a few mugs with the 87 to 92 logo on them. One is $95. One is $8 right now. One has a buy it now price of $17.99. I think the Cordon Blue stamp on the bottom of the mug makes it slightly more valuable – Here’s one with a buy it now price of $27.99
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Starbucks-Mug-Old-Logo-Navel-Cordon-Bleu-/130540732099?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e64d57ec3
Good luck and have fun on ebay!
Hi Rita-
I have been looking to find one of those original orange mugs like the one pictured on this blog. I would be willing to pay $300 for it if you still have it. Or Melody – if you’re willing to part with yours… 🙂 Or anyone else that might know where I could find one. Please email me at rachk46@yahoo.com. Thank you!
I’ve been looking for the 2004ish halloween monster mugs, one was green and the other orange. Both had vampire/ghouly faces. I broke mine but I love the size, shape and they are some of the first merch I bought as a Store Manager.