This is a picture of people waiting in a line that stretched down an entire block to get a can of beans (!!!!!) The backstory:
I posted a few weeks ago that Heyday Canning Co. would be opening a pop up in NYC. We thought we'd cooked up a clever idea to open a bean store that only sells Heyday beans and only accepts beans as currency. Give a bean, get a bean! And for the real diehard bean fiends, we made bean hats, socks, and tote bags and even acquired signed portraits of Beans from Even Stevens and Beanie Feldstein (all of which would "sell" for varying amounts of canned beans). All beans that come in would get donated to City Harvest. It would be a weird wacky store just for bean lovers where everything is beans.
We knew we had a super fun idea and were excited to connect with our (relatively small) community of fans and hopefully get a lot of folks off the street who would be intrigued by the concept of a bean store. We thought we had planned conservatively for the number of visitors and number of beans that would be walking through the door....
WRONG! Our assumptions were so wrong across the board:
?? The shop went viral on TikTok and the picture on this post is the line we had before we opened on our third day. We were so overwhelmed with demand that we sold through all of our beans and just about all of our merch on day 2. We hustled to overnight more beans for Saturday. We were selling so fast that we implemented a max of one can per swap for all new vistors. I walked down this line of people in line before we opened on Saturday wand told them about the new cap on bean swapping.....and they STILL waited on that line! To get one! can! of! beans!
?? We had assumed most folks would be coming into the store off the street (and naturally would not have any beans on them) or if they had heard about the shop, they would bring in a can, or maaaybe a few cans of beans. Extremely wrong. Our first visitor (who arrived 30 mins before we opened on Thursday) came with 28 cans. And it didn't slow down from there...we regularly unpacked backpacks and suitcases full of beans with the record being a whopping 70 cans.
?? We felt like the hottest streetwear brand in New York for a sec with people going absolutely nuts for bean-themed and Heyday branded socks, hats, and totes. As the co-founder of a bean company, beans are obviously my entire personality, but it turns out I am so so very far from alone on that one
?? As a result of all the beanthusiasm we ended up donating thousands of canned beans to City Harvest (and will be matching all of the bean currency we received for everything purchased in the store with a donation from Heyday). I don't have the final tally yet, but this donation ended up being so much more impactful than we dreamed. We also had a lot of people arrive with tons of beans after we were all sold out and had nothing to swap. 100% of those people still donated their beans - amazing
Long story short...people friggin love BEANS
