Starbucks is officially tired of the backlash that it undoubtedly deals with every single year when releasing its holiday season cup. Usual complaints range from the cups not being festive enough to them being festively exclusive. The solution? Release more than a single design, hopefully satisfying a larger portion of the Starbucks-holiday-cups-obsessed segment of the American population.
This year's 13 new cups (note: one, meant for cold drinks, is missing from the image above), which will officially hit 25,000 Starbucks locations across 75 counties today, were designed by different women from six countries (including Canada, Dubai, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea and the United States of America). Picked from a crowd-sourced selection of over 1,000 customer designs that were posted on Instagram last year as part of the #RedCupContest, these cups signal the company's abandonment of its 24-year-old one-cup approach.
“This year, […] we decided to do something quite different,” said CEO Howard Schultz during the campaign's official launch in New York City. “With everything that’s going on in the world, and everything that’s going on in our country, we have a lot to be thankful for."
“We hope that this year’s red holiday cup designs express the shared spirit of the holidays as told by our customers,” said Starbucks’ global chief marketing officer Sharon Rothstein in a press release.
The company will also offer customers a cool promotion starting today through November 14: when ordering a holiday drink between 2pm and 5pm, patrons will receive an additional free holiday beverage.