Introducing YES PLZ, “The Mix”, and my return to ☕️➡️📭
Friends,
When I started making a list of who to share this first prototype batch with (family, dear friends, respected longtime coffee allies, and key stalwart supporters who contributed to the success of Tonx Coffee) the list turned out to be over a hundred people! Seeing these names come up is very humbling and I’m feeling a lot of gratitude. It delights me to take this opportunity to send to a handful of you our very first batch from this latest endeavor, and I hope you’ll indulge me the abridged origin story.
If you asked what I was doing next after Tonx Coffee sold to Blue Bottle you might’ve heard a reluctant elevator pitch for the big coffee book I was attempting to write. It’s been a back burner desire since my Seattle days. An overdue exploration of what was happening in this weird, rapidly mutating world of high-end coffee. It’s long felt to me there was no clear path for would-be connoisseurs to approach our emerging coffee scene — no obvious on-ramps.
But as I started writing there was that whole election thing to get wrapped up in. Surely I’d make better progress on the book once we had a new President and I could stop paying attention to all the… well. We know how that worked out. Other projects and concerns emerged to take the front burner.
This latest endeavor, YES PLZ, has a similar premise to Tonx Coffee. We’ll release an ever-evolving blend, “The Mix”, in a fresh box every week with an awesome newsletter. You can subscribe and get a box weekly, fortnightly, every third week, monthly, or just whenever. No big whoop.
The genesis of YES PLZ lies in my partnership with Sumi Ali, the brains behind the project we did to bring delicious $1 coffee to Roy Choi and Daniel Paterson’s revolutionary fast food venture LocoL. It’s rare to find yourself in a business partnership where vision and temperament align so strongly and where you’ve already shared enough battles to have become great collaborators. I’m very lucky.
For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Sumi, let me take a moment to talk him up. I first met him when he moved to LA from Atlanta (where he’d opened his first coffeebar as a teenager) when he was working at Intelligentsia’s Venice location. Multiple friends let me know in whispers that he was the best barista in the shop and to angle to get my drink made by him, which was a good call.
His next gig was being the first barista at the Silverlake pop-up that would quickly give birth to both the SQIRL and G&B Coffee empires. Anyone who got to experience SQIRL in that first year likely has fond memories of Sumi’s hospitality. I was there nearly every day and got to know him well. I felt like he had the right combination of skills to be a great roaster — he is a gifted mechanic and motorsports weirdo with a really phenomenal palate for tasting coffee, and a strong aversion to bullshit. When the time was right, we hired him at Tonx Coffee.
After Tonx Coffee he got his feet wet in the green coffee importing world and helped set up a few other roasteries. When Roy and Daniel reached out about their ambitions for LocoL’s coffee, I decided I’d only do it if Sumi could be convinced to jump on board. We made our coffee project work, validated a lot of our assumptions, shook up our scene a bit, and learned a lot from our front row seats to the making of LocoL.
Better coffee has been gaining momentum but the implicit message is often some bullshit that great coffee is an acquired taste for hip, trend-chasing epicures. That good coffee at home required deep pockets, fancy gear, and fanatical technical precision. That real connoisseurship only comes in the form of being able to deconstruct a coffee into the biggest possible pile of esoteric flavor descriptors.
Back in 2007 when I left Intelligentsia after the craziness of getting their first LA store up and running, I debated doing a book to cut through some of that pretense and proselytizing. Or maybe I’d build a better roasting company, one dedicated to home consumers. I wrestled with all this while “finding myself” — switching cities, turmoil, relationships, happiness, heartbreak, consulting, living off the grid, a short-lived marriage, psychedelic journeys, and nomadism. I was close to broke, couchsurfing, everything I owned packed into a ’93 Honda Civic with a blown head gasket. Ultimately pulling the trigger on my coffee roasting business plan seemed like a better bet to pay the bills than a year spent working on a book. With a bit of luck and help from the right people, Tonx Coffee was born.
Selling out wasn’t Plan A, B or C for Tonx Coffee (or I’d have never put my name on it!), but we were an internet startup with some venture funding, a trajectory, and a lot to prove. It was always high stakes. In the end, even though we were hashtag CrushingIt, a partnership with a bigger fish won out against staying on the treadmill of raising more money on worse terms with the expectation that we should become a hundred million dollar business. Things will be very different this time!
I’ll cut to the chase — we’re launching a pre-sale on Kickstarter very shortly. We’re not crowdfunding because we’re trying to raise funds per se — our roasting facility is up and running, our biggest capital expenses are covered, and we’ve taken just a small amount of one-time investment from a few friends — if I’m being honest, we are coming into this with a ton of unfair advantages. We know we can make a great product without cutting corners on the quality of our raw materials and still deliver it at a low price, making it accessible to a wider audience.
No, the reason we’re launching on Kickstarter is more culinary than corporate. A Kickstarter gives us a window into how much demand we’re looking at so we don’t contract too much green coffee, compromising our product with aging inventory — or buy too little and find ourselves scrambling to find top coffees to scale up and meet demand.
Right-sizing our production is just part of right-sizing our whole operation. We are unabashedly aiming to be financially sustainable early on. We’re working with lower margins, which means no grand startup adventuring for hyper growth and all the added complexity that comes with it. We are leaning on the strength of our product experience and the drive of our long-term culinary desires.
The price point we want to hit is pretty ambitious. In our upcoming Kickstarter we’re pricing at just $15 for a 12oz box, shipping included. If we see enough support early on, we think we might be able to drop that price even lower when we launch to the public. Though we’re not doing a big PR push, we hope enough people want to see this product happen to launch us into a stable orbit. We’re asking all our friends to consider backing our Kickstarter early and to encourage their friends to give us a shot too.
Thanks for reading and feel free to reach out with feedback, questions, or crazy ideas any time. We owe all of the success of Tonx Coffee to our friends and we’re looking forward to having you with us on this new adventure.
xo,
Tony
ps — you can keep up on our progress by jumping on our email list at YESPLZ.coffee and following us on Instagram and/or Twitter @YESPLZdotCOFFEE
