During the rebranding process the time came to choose the color of our retail cups. Previously, and for many years, our retail cups had been brown, and since brown was part of the new palette there was some thought about staying with what people knew. It was familiar. But my creative director and I wanted to use the blue from our new palette because you can see someone walking down the street with a blue cup a block away. If you walk past someone’s desk and there is a blue cup sitting there, it catches your eye. Brown blends into the background. Our blue compostable retail cups became iconic almost immediately. In the neighborhoods where we have retail stores the blue cup identifies you as a member of the Batdorf & Bronson tribe. In Atlanta, when people would find out where I worked, they would often tell me how seeing one of our blue cups on a co-worker’s desk made them jealous, or how happy they were when they saw a co-worker approaching with two blue cups and “one of them is mine.”

Many of the “Blue Cup Photo Bombs” below appeared on social media without captions. When there is a famous person in the photo it is usually a birthday or historic event. Many captions were related to some odd holiday or moment in history and the caption appeared within the post. The bad “Photoshop” is intentional because we never wanted anyone to think we were trying to fool people or fake an endorsement. But the contextual absurdity in most of the images ended up being charming in a way while the bright blue against black and white is exactly what our cups look like when you find one “out in the wild.”