Jimmy Butler's passion for coffee

In 2020, the NBA decided to establish a bubble inside the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, a completely isolated facility from the rest of the world to finish the season, which was threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The reviews from that period are mixed. Some players admitted to having suffered mentally and psychologically due to being far from home, while others described the experience as positive, as if they had spent weeks on vacation at a resort. It is in this context that Jimmy Butler's passion for coffee developed, the first distinctive trait of the Miami Heat player we encounter during the viewing of Starting 5, the docuseries produced by Netflix in collaboration with Uninterrupted, the production company associated with LeBron James. Butler is one of the players who opened up his private life to the cameras, and the first secret he reveals is that he is a big coffee drinker, so much so that, during the recording, he is about to have his sixth cappuccino of the day while sitting in the café of his Miami villa. It’s an impromptu scene, but it actually fits perfectly into Butler’s life and, more importantly, his business.

Let’s go back to the Orlando bubble. As mentioned, it is in this context that Butler discovers his passion for coffee. According to his own account, after reviewing the various types of coffee available to everyone in the bubble, he realized that the quality would be low, and that people would be willing to pay extra for a higher-quality coffee. So, he decided to bring his personal coffee machine with him. Skipping over the preliminaries, Butler soon found himself selling cups of coffee for twenty dollars each, becoming the largest coffee distributor inside the bubble, earning a total profit, by his own admission, of between 1,000 and 6,000 dollars. This is the origin of Big Face, the brand Butler initially created to sell coffee, which today is also a clothing line and an online shop for a variety of gadgets, tools, and other (food and non-food) products related to coffee consumption. Butler took this passion seriously, turning it into a business.

He went to Costa Rica to study the qualities and types of coffee beans, then struck a deal with Shopify, a Canadian company specializing in providing the infrastructure for online commerce to companies that join its program, in exchange for a portion of the revenue. However, the deal with Butler is different. The basketball player essentially became a Shopify ambassador, a significant case of influencer marketing: Butler offered the company his worldwide popularity to generate credibility, and in return, he gained full control over the revenue. Revenue that, in Butler’s plans, is set to grow dramatically. In the era of Specialty Coffee, even celebrities do not want to miss this business opportunity.

The idea is to turn coffee into a luxury product, not just a drink that gets us through long workdays, but a cocktail to enjoy while watching the Miami sunset. It’s no surprise, then, that his most recent business deal was made with Bacardi. “I would have entered the 2020 NBA bubble just to regularly drink this coffee” was the New York Times review, guaranteeing the product's quality. The idea of class, luxury, and privilege is also emphasized by the packaging, as Big Face Coffee products are delivered in boxes that resemble iPhone packaging. What started almost as a joke is now a business that, as the New York Times reminds us, has the potential to replicate the success of the countless tequila brands launched by Hollywood celebrities in recent years.