We’re in the process of making a few changes to the way we send out your delicious Kopi each month (some of you may have noticed already!). The bag and box haven’t really changed in the last year, mostly because we liked the size and it fits through most letterboxes, but also because trying to get anything different was a long and complicated process in dealing with archaic bag and box companies.

After months of work, we signed a deal to get special Kopi custom bags made with a great supplier and these are currently in production, hopefully ready to roll out in July. They’ll be the lovely matt black colour and finish you’ve come to love, but will be taller and wider (almost like a 500g bag but a tad wider). This month, though, we needed an interim solution while the bags are still being made - hence the brown kraft bags you will have received this month. Don’t worry - we really hope we’ll be swapping to the new black bags for July.

With this in mind, we thought long and hard and redesigned the label to make more use of the extra space now available on the bag. We hope you like it.

Why? Well, mostly it’s because we can now start to post your Kopi as large letters (instead of the small packets we were using) with the Royal Mail which saves us many thousands of pounds every month in postage costs. This means we don’t have to increase prices - hurray! Also it means even more people should now have no issues with it going through the letterbox for the ultimate convenience.

So please bear with us this month while we go through the transition and we’d love to get your feedback now or in July when the new bags arrive.

Well, it has been an interesting week that’s for sure….frustrating may be a better word for both us and for some of you as members.

Royal Mail has been putting up their prices over the last couple of years quite substantially, which has been having a significant effect on small businesses that rely on the post as part of their business proposition. In fact, since we began Kopi - the Royal Mail now charge us 40% more for posting your box each month than when we first started.

We’ve always tried to absorb these costs without affecting your pricing, and that led to our decision in late February to try switching to UK Mail to deliver the boxes. This is a company that still uses Royal Mail to deliver the “last mile” of the post (very similar to the way BT deliver the last bit of cabling into your home no matter which broadband ADSL provider you use), but have their own network for handling everything before then. They work out cheaper than Royal Mail and from what we had been told, had no drop in service level quality.

Unfortunately, we were wrong in believing this.

A variety of issues have been coming to light about the UK Mail service, most notably:

• Delays - despite boxes leaving our fulfilment house on the 11th of the month, delivery has taken up to 7 working days for some members (they should land around the 14th of every month).
• Damages - some boxes haven’t been arriving in the pristine condition we try and enforce.
• Lost - we’ve had a fair amount of boxes go missing or reporting as not being arrived (which could be related to the delay’s). In some cases this is because UK mail have been seen tying boxes together from the same postcode region so some people have received other members boxes because they happen to live in the same “region”.

We really would like to offer our apologies for any of our members this has affected (luckily a good percentage of you have not had these issues), and that we will correct and rectify every single issue. If you have any of the above problems, please do contact us right away at [email protected] (title your email POSTAL ISSUES)

From next month, we are going back to Royal Mail for every single order. No question about it. We pride ourselves on top quality service and product at every stage of the journey and despite the increase in pricing, we believe this is best for our members.

Here’s to a much better May and thank you very much for understanding.

The Kopi team (Phil, Julie, Jim, Sara, and Geoff)

Here at Kopi, one thing we’re always asked about is how people can try the outstanding premium coffee experience that is Kopi, without actually paying for it. Well, we’ve been working round the clock to get our brand new subscription plan ready to help solve that problem.

As of 9am this morning (01/04/2013), we are pleased to announce the new base-level 100% FREE Kopi Subscription plan that gives you the same full experience as all our affordable paid plans, but without any of the cost! As per the usual club, members still receive a premium and rare coffee from around the world, freshly roasted, with a lovely tasting booklet (now mostly filled with adverts) and posted through your letterbox (in a box plastered with adverts).

“How is this possible?” we hear you ask… well, simples… it’s fully ad-supported. Every booklet, bag, and box is sponsored by the many premium brands who scramble to put their messages in front of you every month. Thanks to these sponsors, we don’t have to charge you a penny for this plan.

Chief Bean Philip Wilkinson commented “So many other subscription businesses have a free ad-supported paid level plan and we didn’t want to be any different. We’ve always wanted to give everything away for free so this is now the perfect chance for us to do so. Who said there is no such thing as a free coffee?”

There are a limited number of 399 places available for this plan, on a first-come, first-served basis - so register your interest quickly via [email protected]