In 2020 the NBA decided to establish a bubble inside the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, a structure completely isolated from the rest of the world in which to conclude the season threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The testimonies of that period are varied. There are players who confessed to having suffered mentally and psychologically from being away from home and others who instead said they had a positive experience, as if they had spent a holiday for weeks in a resort. It is in this context that it develops the passion of Jimmy Butler for coffeethe first distinctive trait of the Miami Heat player that we come across while watching Starting 5the docu-series signed by Netflix together with Uninterrupted, the production company linked to LeBron James. Butler is one of the players who opened his private sphere to the cameras and the first secret revealed that he is a great coffee drinker, so much so that at the time of recording he is about to drink the sixth cappuccino of his day sitting in the coffee shop of his villa in Miami. It is an impromptu scene but in reality it fits perfectly into Butler’s life and above all into Butler’s business.
Let’s go back to the Orlando bubble. As mentioned, it is in this context that Butler discovers a passion for coffee. According to his own version, after reading the different types of coffee available to those present in the bubble, he understood that the quality would be poor and that therefore people would pay extra to have higher quality coffee. So he decided to take his car with him to make his coffee every morning. Forgetting all the preliminaries, Butler soon found himself selling cups of coffee for twenty dollars a pop, becoming the largest coffee distributor within the bubble for a total profit that, by his own admission, was somewhere between 1000 and 6000 dollars. This is the genesis of Big Facethe brand created by Butler initially to sell coffee and which today also includes a clothing line as well as an online shop where it is possible to find a series of gadgets, tools and other products (food and non-food) related to coffee consumption. Butler took this passion seriously, transforming it into a real business.
Jimmy Butler was in Costa Rica to study the qualities and types of coffee beans, after which he closed an agreement with Shopifya Canadian company specialized in providing online commerce infrastructure to companies participating in the program in exchange for a percentage of revenues. The agreement with Butler, however, is different. The basketball player actually became a testimonial for Shopify, a great case of influencer marketing: Butler offered the company his worldwide popularity in order to generate credibility and in exchange he obtained complete control of the revenues. In the era of Specialty Coffeeeven celebrities don’t want to miss this business opportunity.
The idea is to transform coffee into a luxury productnot only the drink that accompanies us on long working days but a cocktail with which to enjoy the Miami sunset. And it is therefore not surprising that in this sense the most recent commercial agreement was made with Bacardi. «I would have entered the 2020 NBA bubble just to drink this coffee regularly» was the New York Times review to guarantee the quality of the product. The idea of class, luxury and privilege is also emphasized by the packaging given that Big Face Coffee products are delivered in boxes that resemble those of iPhones. It was born almost as a joke, now it is a business which, as the New York Times reminds us, has the potential to replicate the diffusion of the countless tequila brands that have been born in recent years from the minds of Hollywood celebrities.
