Pumpkin Spice and Vincent Price

I remember when Starbucks first came out with the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

I felt like I had found ‘my drink’. This was 2003 and at the time, there wasn’t the over saturation of Pumpkin Spice candles, Pumpkin Spice moisturizers, Pumpkin Spice flavored UGG’s or…whatever. If you remember, Halloween hadn’t been super commercialized yet. You couldn’t go into Rite Aid and find some really cool stuff like you sometimes can now.

The point is, I felt like the company was speaking to ME. ‘Hey-coffee drinking guy with all the Halloween Tattoos!!?!?! We understand you…check this out…’

Fast Forward to 2017. It seems like every reality star or B list celebrity is seen on the cover of the National Enquirer mugging with a PSL in their hand. It felt like our drink had been hijacked.

Fast Forward to 2018 we start Dead Sled Coffee. Fall comes upon us and we debate on doing a Pumpkin Spice coffee. On one hand, it would probably be good business. Everyone is buying it like Taylor Swift buying… well..Pumpkin Spice Lattes…and there was the problem.

We started Dead Sled for the outcasts. How could we make something sincerely like, but not look like we’re cashing in? We decided that not only would our Pumpkin Spice be infused with (not flavored by) Pumpkin, but we would sell it year round! Because we love pumpkins YEAR ROUND! 
Great IDEA…but when you’re selling Pumpkin Spice in April, people assume it’s old stock. Which it wasn’t. Dead Sled prides itself in shipping THE freshest coffee on the market. We usually roast on Tuesday and or Thursday of every week. So if you order on Wednesday, that coffee is roasted on Thursday and with an ambitious mailman you get it Saturday.

Again, we found ourselves in a situation where we felt like the perception could be against our standards.

Well, when life gives us lemons-we make coffee!

Summer of 2019 at a Dead Sled business meeting we discuss ‘What are we going to do about Pumpkin Spice this year?’  How do we make another run at this and keep it for the outsiders. We believe that good coffee is like hearing a great story form an old friend. And who would be a better person to have as a friend to hear stories from than Vincent Price? Ummmm…nobody?!?! And wait…the name Vincent Price even rhymes with Pumpkin Spice! And I can almost promise you that neither Taylor Swift, the cast of Jersey Shore, or whomever else is on the cover of the Enquirer this week has any inkling who Vincent Price is.

But we do. Vincent is like the grandfather or uncle for the coffee outcast. 
By making Vincent Price the face for our Pumpkin Spice.