Taste and See

You’ve probably seen them without even realizing what it is you’re looking at. Over the past four years, a company has almost created a whole new identity for themselves and increased revenue by 10x. The only thing they changed was the color of their cup. Ok that might be over simplifying it a bit, but Stanley cups are everywhere now.

Contrary to what you might think, Stanley cups are not the same company as the Stanley tool company. However, they’ve been in business for over 100 years selling camping cookware. Until a few years ago, they were pretty much unheard of. They had a small scattering of business, mostly men looking for adventure gear, but the general public had no clue who they were. Then a few women saw the potential in this product. They got with the executive team at Stanley and convinced them that by just changing colors and convincing them to use social media marketing. Now, everywhere you go you will see these crazy colorful tumblers in the hands of women.

What’s fascinating for me is that Stanley had the right product all along. They didn’t make any engineering changes to their cups, they literally just changed the color to appeal to a different demographic. The cup keeps water just as cold as it did before, a fact that if not true would be disastrous for the cup maker.

This kind of reminds me of Psalm 34, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” David was inviting people to give God a chance. He knew that that God was good and that when you find refuge in Him you will be blessed. One of the biggest problems then, just as it is now, is getting people to take that first step. We know that God is good, but how do we get people to taste and see? For Stanley that meant changing colors. For us it might mean we leave our comfort zones. Maybe it’s starting with just asking people to try it out (it’s really hard to change anything else if you don’t even ask).