Death Wish Coffee helping other local businesses
Local tattoo artist designs shirt for sale with hope to raise $75K
Death Wish Coffee was created in the basement of Saratoga Coffee Traders in 2012, and now the brand is sold in grocery stores across the country.
But the business didn’t forget its roots when it started to see local businesses struggle during the coronavirus pandemic.
The coffee company will split all proceeds from shirt sales between the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce, Brewnited — a consortium of local brewers — and local businesses in the Capital Region. Death Wish hopes to raise $75,000.
Shannon Sweeney, marketing manager for Death Wish Coffee Co., said the company wanted to pay it forward to the community that has always supported them.
“When we thought about ways we could help our community we thought about all the ways the Capital Region rallied around us,” Sweeney said. “We thought this was a great time to pay back to the people and service industry workers that have been there for us.”
There are two shirt designs: one shirt reads “When this is all over, please continue to stay at least 6 feet away from me” and was inspired by a meme. The other was designed by an Albany-based tattoo artist Melanie Lucia-clarke. It has an intricate design of a skeleton and says “Broke, Not Busted,” which is the name of the fundraising campaign.
“We wanted to give people something tangible that they could look at and say, ‘Wow this is going to a great cause,’” Sweeney said.
Sweeney said they also intentionally picked an artist that was local to the Capital Region to design the shirts.
“It is important to us to have a local artist who has been affected by this to design this T-shirt so we can give her a commission, and she can get her work out there,” Sweeney said.
Lucia-clarke and her husband, Pete Clarke, both work at The Dead Presidents Lounge, a custom tattoo shop and art gallery in Albany. The tattoo parlor has been closed along with many other non-essential businesses in the Capital Region since the state has been put on “pause.”
In her shirt design, Lucia-clarke tried to give a nod to as many service workers as possible.
“I tried to represent as many as I could fit — tattooers, servers, artists, bartenders, body workers, cosmetologists, and barbers — there are so many others not represented,” Clarke said. “We don’t get paid time off, sick leave, or traditional unemployment insurance. We rely solely on serving our clients and customers for our financial wellbeing.”