Why Every Stay Brewed Order Comes With a Hand-Colored Picture
By Craig & Lori Weyer | Stay Brewed Coffee & Roastery | Saint Anthony, Indiana
When your Stay Brewed order arrives, there’s something inside that you won’t find in any other coffee shipment in the country.
A hand-colored picture. Made just for you. By one of our daughters.
Not printed. Not stamped. Not a generic insert from a fulfillment warehouse. A real picture, colored by a real kid, for the real person whose name is on the box.
People ask us about it all the time. They post photos of the pictures on their refrigerators. A few have even framed them. We’ve received messages from customers who weren’t expecting it and didn’t quite know what to make of it at first — and then wrote to tell us it was their favorite part of the whole order.
This is the story behind it.
Seven Girls Who Love to Color
Craig and Lori Weyer are the parents of seven daughters. They homeschool all of them, which means the girls are home — present, engaged, and part of the daily rhythm of the roastery — in a way that most kids aren’t part of their parents’ work.
From the beginning, the girls have grown up watching Stay Brewed take shape around them. They’ve seen the roaster fired up in the garage. They’ve watched orders get packed. They’ve heard their parents talk about customers — where they live, what they ordered, what they wrote in a note. The business has never been something that happens somewhere else. It happens right here, in their home, as part of their family’s daily life.
And these girls love to color. They are artistic, creative, and enthusiastic in the way that kids are when they’ve been given the space and encouragement to make things. Give them paper and colored pencils and they are happy. Give them a purpose — a real person on the other end who is going to open a box and find what they made — and they light up.
That combination is where the hand-colored pictures came from.
A Way to Contribute — Even at a Young Age
One of the things Craig and Lori have always wanted for their daughters is for them to understand what it means to build something. Not just to watch it happen, but to be part of it. To contribute something real, with their own hands, that matters to someone else.
The hand-colored pictures are exactly that.
Every girl — even the youngest — can pick up a colored pencil and make something beautiful for a stranger who is about to receive a bag of coffee they ordered from a family in Indiana. She doesn’t need to be old enough to run the roaster or pack the orders. She just needs to love what she’s doing and care about the person who will receive it.
And they do. They genuinely do.
There is something in a child that rises to meet real responsibility — not pretend responsibility, not busy work, but the actual knowledge that what they make is going to travel across the country and land in someone’s hands and mean something. These girls know that. They feel it. And it shows in what they make.
What Happens When the Pictures Arrive
We weren’t entirely sure what customers would think when the first pictures went out. We hoped they’d appreciate it. We didn’t anticipate how much.
The messages started coming in. Customers posting photos on social media of the pictures propped up on their kitchen counters. Notes telling us they hung it on the refrigerator. One customer who had it framed — framed, matted, and hung on their wall — and sent us a photo of it in place.
We read every one of those messages to the girls.
You can imagine what that does for a child who colored that picture. Who chose those colors carefully and stayed inside the lines and maybe added something extra in the corner because she felt like it. To find out that it traveled hundreds of miles and ended up on someone’s wall — that it was worth framing — is not a small thing for a little girl to learn about herself and about the work she does.
That feedback loop — customer to family to girls — is one of our favorite things about Stay Brewed. It closes a circle that most businesses never close. The person who colored your picture and the person who framed it are connected, even if they’ll never meet.
A Labor of Love — Literally
We mean it when we say it’s a labor of love. It takes real time. With every order that goes out, one of the girls sits down and colors a picture — carefully, intentionally, with the knowledge that a real person is going to open that package.
There is no automation for this. There is no shortcut. Every picture is different because every girl is different, and every picture reflects the particular artistic sensibility of whichever daughter made it — her favorite colors, her attention to detail, the little flourishes she adds because she wants to.
That’s the point. Mass production can replicate a lot of things. It cannot replicate a seven-year-old deciding which shade of blue looks best and adding a small flower in the corner because she thought you’d like it.
What It Means to Us as a Family
Stay Brewed was built on the conviction that business and family don’t have to be separate things. That you can run a company that reflects your values, involves your children, and treats every customer like a person rather than a transaction.
The hand-colored pictures are the most visible expression of that conviction.
They say: we know you’re a real person. We wanted to send you something real in return. We put our daughters to work on it because they love to do it and because they love the idea of you opening that box and finding something made just for you.
It is, in the truest sense, a family business — all the way down to the colored pencils.
Thank You for Being Part of This
Every customer who posts a photo of their picture, who writes to tell us their kids loved it, who mentions that it’s on their refrigerator or their wall — you are doing something important without knowing it.
You are teaching our daughters that the work they do matters. That the care they put into something reaches real people and makes a real difference. That a little girl with colored pencils in a garage in Saint Anthony, Indiana can make something that ends up framed on a wall somewhere across the country.
That is an extraordinary thing to be able to show a child.
So thank you. For ordering. For caring. For posting the pictures. For framing them. You are part of this family in more ways than you know.
Stay Brewed. Stay the Course.
— Craig, Lori & Girls
Every Stay Brewed order — subscription or one-time — includes a hand-colored picture from one of our daughters. No two are ever alike.
Stay Brewed Coffee & Roastery | Saint Anthony, Indiana craig@staybrewed.com | 812.661.9576 | staybrewed.com