Metromint Team: Scott, Evan, Corina, Rio, Lara, Jaime, Jenn, and Jon outside the SF Food Bank.
Last Wednesday our Metromint crew volunteered at the SF Food Bank for 3 hours as part of Project Goodberrymint. It was a fun and awesome experience! Our project leader provided us with a great sense of humor while we packed, weighed, labeled, and boxed over 3,500 pounds of rice. It felt amazing to know that our efforts will help feed thousands of people who are in need. I definitely want to volunteer at the SF Food Bank again in the near future!
Related Note: Take the SF Food Bank Quiz to donate $2 to SF Food Bank efforts.
11/5/10 by Jaime Borschuk, Interactive Design Manager
What a week to live in San Francisco! Halloween, the Giants' victory, November elections, Dia de los Meurtos, and then the Giants' Championship Parade. The Metromint office, located just 4 blocks from the thick of the Parade, closed operations early on Wednesday so our team could head out to enjoy the festivities. The turnout is believed to be the largest in San Francisco's history for a parade or a civic event. I'm not even a baseball fan, but the excitement on the street was palpable and a cool thing to see and feel first hand. Go Giants!
7/14/10 by Jaime Borschuk, Interactive Design Manager
This year Metromint decided to make a 30 second video spot to run online as part of our summer ad campaign. While discussing possible ways to summarize the product in that small amount of time, we wondered what our fans would say.
We have great fans who say great things about Metromint, and we thank you for your endless phone calls and emails. All of your experiences with Metromint bring new excitement and associations to the brand that we can't always come up with on our own. In addition to making our own video about Metromint, we wanted to know what YOUR videos would look like, and so we ran The Metromint Very Short Video Contest, for which we challenged YOU to make a video about your experience with Metromint that was at most 25 seconds long.
For this contest we decided that we would review the entries ourselves and hand pick 5 that we felt fit the brand, told a story, and held entertainment value. From there, we would let YOU vote on which video would win the grand prize, a 32G iPad, and 2nd Prize, a $200 Apple gift card.
We were impressed and delighted by the quality of submissions we received. It was difficult to narrow the entries down to just 5 finalists— we wanted to change it to 10!— but those were the rules. Below is a playlist of our top 5. Congratulations to Colton Phipps, who was voted Grand Prize Winner, and Jonathan Mann, voted 2nd place!
You can see more entries on our YouTube Channel, and soon on the Video Jukebox I'm building for our homepage.
While the video contest was going on, we were busy building our own 30 second piece. It would be an animation! Instead of outsourcing this whole project to an agency, we decided to take a smaller scale approach.
Metromint Creative Director Jon Weber provided the initial concept and storyboards, and animator Alexander Tarrant brought the imagery to life. Metromint's Marketing Coordinator Jenn Chan, Founder Rio Miura, and summer temp Justin Sedor (in this order in the photograph to the right) worked together to develop and mix the music and sound effects that would accompany the voiceover we produced with the help of Voice One.
And the final product? Here it is! Our 30 second Metromint piece is now airing on Hulu for the next few weeks, along with select user generated content from the video contest. We like how our piece turned out, and we hope it succeeds in introducing our story.
This Halloween, Metromint held an online costume contest for our fans. We were happy to receive a number of costume photos from enthusiastic fans and, though difficult, we narrowed it down to one winner: Jenikah. Jenikah spent a week making this beautiful peacock costume by hand! These photos show the costume modeled by Megan Jade:
The Metromint office also held a costume contest among employees. Founder Rio Miura and President Scott Lowe awarded the grand prize of 1 paid day off to Jenn Chan, who wore a Bruno inspired Velcro suit that kept her warm, uncomfortable, and sticking to everyone and everything all day long. Yours truly was declared the 2nd prize winner of a $75 gift certificate to Whole Foods for my Alladin Sane-era version of David Bowie's alter ego Ziggy Stardust, which Metromint President Scott Lowe deemed as "solid." Honorable mentions went to Kiyoe Nakazawa's cheerleading costume, and Tessa Phosrithong's Vampire costume. Go team!
I am writing to report that there is a new addition to the Metromint family this week. Metromint founder Rio Muira and President Scott Lowe are the proud new parents of their fourth child, a boy, born on Tuesday, September 23. More info to come, but for now a photo:
5/13/09
by Michele Thorne, Wellness & Outreach Director
A few weeks ago Jaime, Jenn, and I decided to get out of the office for our Monday morning team meeting. We took a field trip around the corner to Brickhouse restaurant and met over a light breakfast.
The sun was shining beautifully through the big windows and we sat right up front to bask in it. As we were discussing our current projects, I looked up to see three beautiful paintings on the wall, one with a Metromint bottle painted in as one of the subjects. The paintings were created by Hiroko Sakai. She is native to Japan, but lives here in SF now. I decided to interview her via email.
MT: How long have you been painting? HS: I’ve been painting since I can remember, but my professional art career started in the early 1990’s. In the beginning of my career, I forced myself to “never say I can’t”. Whatever project I got, the first thing I would say is “OK. I can do it!”.
MT: What brought you to San Francisco? HS: Well, I was in Japan working when I had a medical condition that landed me in the hospital. During that time, I met a man (who was from America) and he encouraged and supported my healing. We had a whirlwind romance and we married in Japan. Shortly after, I moved to San Francisco. I was pregnant when I moved here and it was a huge change. My relationship became abusive and I knew I had to leave. I went to the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco with my 4 month-old baby, which saved my life.
MT: How did you get back to painting after that? HS: I began drawing to sweep out my stuck emotions which had piled up inside. At first, my sketches were colorless, and then one by one, they slowly came back to my paper. My art was healing.
MT: What was your inspiration to include Metromint in your painting? HS: I always enjoy doing something fun and playful in my paintings; adapting edgy and/or traditional elements with things that people feel common or familiar with. The painting you saw in the café is called “Mystery” and the inspiration was a parody of the famous statue “Venus de Milo”. I thought it would be fun to add some modern imaginations on her lost arms. Then, I thought Metromint is one of the things that represents a modern, fashionable girl’s life.
1/15/09 by Michele Thorne, Wellness & Outreach Director
Every now and again I have to bring my son to the office. It's not because he just wants to hang out with me, nor is it because there is anything especially child friendly about our office. When he is here, though, he finds a way to be creative, and it is inspiring.
With palettes of Metromint and Metroelectro, boxes for sending out samples, and of course desks and people, our office doesn’t seem at first sight to be the most creative place. It is a loft with cement, bricks, high ceilings…but there is something. You can feel it when you walk around. Maybe it's the skylight, or maybe it’s Rio's energy, but whenever employees' kids are here, they are moved to create and inspire us too.
If you ever come to our office, which is often mistaken for a café, you might notice a handful of drawings made by our children. If you come on a day when one of them is here, you might see a Metroelectro roboticon with a hydration laser and extra Metromint energy packs! It is amazing what a little imagination and some tape can do!
11/25/08 by Michele Thorne, Wellness & Outreach Director
Today our controller, Lara, came up to me and said, “you have $7 plus tax." Since she is in control of the money around here, I pondered first before I asked for clarification. With the Mexican take out menu in one hand and a list of orders from every one else in the office in the other, I figured today’s lunch was going to be gifted! An awesome (and delish) surprise when I least expected one!
After placing my veggie fajita burrito order, I asked what was the special occasion? Turns out, we take the bottles from the Metromint we drink in the office to our local recycling facility, and between this month and last month we made back enough cash to buy everyone in the office lunch from our favorite neighborhood mexican eatery, Mexico Au Parc!
Thanks team Metromint. It feels good to appreciate the little things.
9/17/08 by Evan Campbell, Operations Project Manager
Recently, I had about the worst customer service experience that I’ve ever had. The company, which shall remain nameless, did just about everything possible that one could do wrong with finding a reasonable and timely resolution to the problem that, ultimately, they caused. As someone who deals with both CS and IT on a regular basis, it was an extremely frustrating process.
So, what does this have to do with Metromint!? While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with large companies, and dealing with them often is a necessity in this day and age, the entire experience left me with a supreme appreciation for a couple of very simple things that seem to be less and less common in our world today. And, I noticed, these are things that we do at Soma Beverage on a daily basis.
#1 – Talking to a Person (vs. a machine) The automated phone systems most places use these days can be extremely frustrating and unhelpful. #2 – Acknowledgment of the Problem There’s nothing worse than waiting 20 minutes to talk to someone who ultimately puts the issue back on you and goes round in circles. #3 – Finding the Next Step Even if the situation looks difficult, clearly taking action in the right direction makes all the difference in the world.
If you call the # on our bottle of any of our products, someone answers (1). If you have a problem (or are just calling to say you love the product, which happens an amazing amount), we’re readily available to assist and talk (2). Whether it’s tracking down a store or sponsoring an event, we always do our best to get you an answer (3). I’m not sure if it’s simply that we have great fans and customers or if what we do is unique compared to the rest of the marketplace, but the way people react is something to behold, and I’m fortunate to be able to see this on a daily basis.
So, to all the great fans out there that make my job both easy and a pleasure, people like Kristi Olson, Jennifer Eby, Brad Wentz, Brenda Kennedy, Karen Koehn, and Michele & Tony Cepurnieks, to name a few – thank you!!!
