This is super cool. You can send your favorite Starbucks barista a virtual card via the Red Stamp application on your iPhone or iPad. Here’s what I’ve heard:
“For years, customers have requested a way to recognize their favorite baristas on MyStarbucksIdea.com. It is the #13 most popular idea out of more than 150,000 ideas submitted. The Red Stamp website and app now includes a Starbucks Collection, featuring unique digital and physical greeting cards that empower customers to positively recognize their favorite baristas. Customers can personalize and send barista recognition greeting cards through store email or by postcard.Partners are customers, too – you can recognize your favorite store partner through Red Stamp. Check out the Starbucks Collection at www.redstamp.com/collections or download the Red Stamp app through iTunes.”
When you open up the “collections” link, there is a category labeled “Starbucks.” Browse that to find special cards that can be sent to your favorite Starbucks person, and it appears that it can be sent via Facebook, an app, or you can print the e-card.
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By the way, I have to apologize for the huge volume of new articles on this site. I swear, somehow Starbucks just keeps giving me new things to write about. I promise no new articles over the upcoming weekend! It will give you a chance to catch up on the new stuff. Thanks!
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First and foremost Melody you do not have to apologize for the posts. These posts have been terrific and I continue to learn so much. Second, I love this idea of sending a card to your favorite barista. I absolutely know which one it will be. Great idea!
I have to look for the physical greeting cards because the red stamp site is to me a bit convoluted to use and I really would prefer to print out a card and give in person to the partner.
Melody:
Don’t every apologize for sharing great information Starbucks, including this cool new app!
Aneil
@Purple1 – Let me know how it goes!
@Aneil – Thank you! Come join the conversations anytime. 🙂
I can’t find the iPad app. Am I missing something?
Hello all!
I’m glad the Red Stamp app is finally working! We got an action item about it a few days ago, and of course I immediately downloaded the app! But, the Starbucks collection was not there any of the times I checked until this morning.
A couple quick notes: there are a few different ways you can have the card send. You can have it sent as an actual postcard to the store from RedStamp. You do not, in this situation, print it yourself, in the app when you hit send you can have them send it to your store as a postcard. You can also select to email it, and it lets you select the store email address from a search list of Starbucks stores. You can publish it to Facebook, but it’s not posted to your Facebook wall, it gets posted via RedStamp onto the Starbucks Partners page. You can also post it on Instagram or Twitter, and I assume it works similar to Facebook in that it gets posted to a specific Starbucks page, or with a Starbucks Partner hash tag of some sort. It seems as if the main ways to use it, at least the ways that will get sent directly to the barista you want to recognize, is through the email or postcard function, in which case you submit your customized card and then RedStamp gets it sent to your Starbucks. You can save it as a draft to your device, and then somehow print it yourself and bring it in to your store, but I don’t get the feeling that this is how RedStamp envisioned it working
Also, it may take a little while before their addresses get filled out all the way, because when I search for my city in the postcard function, it only lists one store in the entire district. :/.
All in all, I think this is super neat, and if there’s enough visibility/marketing around it, I can totally see this being a cool way for people to directly recognize their favorite Barista!
I have just looked at this site and I like that any of our customers can send the card directly to the store by mail or email or facebook. I am really looking forward to seeing how our customers respond. Thanks Melody for posting about this!
@Amanda – I’m downloading it on my iPad now; when you search for the Red Stamp app, make sure you hit the button at the top for ‘iPhone apps.’ I’m assuming that its not optimized specifically for the iPad and therefore is counted as an ‘iPhone app,’ but will certainly run on an iPad.
Hope this helps!
Here is a thought re this option- I think it is a great idea in addition to perhaps tipping partners but I am a bit concerned about sending a card to the store email as won’t all the partners see the card and then might they wonder or feel bad about why they did not get a card? That is why I would prefer to print it out and hand deliver to my favorite partner. Reminds me in a way of when you stood there waiting to be picked for a team at school! Remember those days!
Purple, only the store manager (and assistant manager if applicable) have access to the store email, so it will be up to us to print out the cards sent and give them to the partner in question. I personally am not planning on making it a ‘you didn’t get picked for the team’ moments. All my partners have cubbies – I will put it in their cubby, and they will see it, just like when they get green apron cards.
@Rebecca – Thanks for the nuts and bolts explanation of how it works. That helps a lot!
Well, I have an Android phone, and the only i-family thing I have is an older iPad. I just tried to download the app, and it won’t let me. “this app requires i06”. I’m bummed. There’s no way for me to use the app version of it.
@BaristaMatt and @Rebecca, thanks for your added value comments.
@Melody, only being available as an Apple App will probably cause a lot of action on MSI. The only saving grace, that will probably be missed by many, is the Red Stamp website. I do hope though that Red Stamp does not continue to ignore the Android Universe, however some quick research does not give me optimism.
Melody, Never apologize for the amount of posts you write. Your blog is fun, informative, and a quick easy read. As long as Starbucks is around I think you may have sore fingers!!:) Have a great day.
@MonicaDillow – I will raise my coffee cup to those sore fingers! Cheers! And thank you!
I tried to use this the other day and send a test card to one of my baristas through the store… it didn’t work. On my end it appeared to, but I never received it in the email to print for my barista. I guess I need to look into it more to figure it out.
:sigh: Really Red Stamp? I can’t look at your website because I’m using Firefox? What is this? 1995?
I do like the idea though, would love to actually look at it.
@SnowWhite, I have no trouble with Red Stamp in Firefox (current version is 19.0.2). Always regularly check that you are running the latest version of Firefox.
Do you have “cookies” turned off? If so they are required. It does not appear that the site needs Java or Flash so that should not be causing your problem.
I also have no problems with Internet Explorer or Chrome.
@DadCooks I am running 19.0.2 and cookies are enabled by default. Everything I click on their webpage gives me:
Welcome!So glad you are here. We are working hard to make RedStamp.com work flawlessly on every modern browser, but given our leading edge products and services, that's a little trickier than it seems.
Never fear, you can download Safari or Chrome for free right here + now and enjoy all kinds of browser bests.
Or, you can download our award-winning app on Apple iTunes for FREE. And if you want to stay posted on the roll-out, please follow our blog and/or drop us a line and we'll be sure to correspond as we go.
Stylishly Yours,
The Red Stamp Team
So I downloaded their app, which will not allow me to search for a Starbucks outside of where it thinks I am. Well, that’s not really true, it let me search, and I tried using the city, state of the cafe from the SBux website and every neighboring town I could think of an all turned up zero results. And I had to create an account just to do that (and fail). So, still giving the app 1 star or less.
@SnowWhite, I am sorry that my suggestions did not work for you.
The other day I did get RedStamp to work, but today I tried it again and get the same messages you did, plus it did not recognise the account I created earlier, even using Chrome or Safari (which Apple has chosen to no longer support on Windows).
Some days “Dad” fails too 😉
grrrr, I really do hate companies that are completely Apple-centric.
Fyi, the APP is not even necessary to send an e-card to your favorite Barista or store. Although I have an iPad & can download the APP, I simply do not have enough storage for yet another one. So I just went on the regular website to send the cards. It was simple, quick & easy to design & edit the card I wanted, choose which Starbucks I wanted it e-mailed to & Red Stamp took it from there. I just wish I can get some sort of confirmation that they received it & read it, w/o actually asking the partners themselves.
But how do we know where to send the cards? Do you expect us to ask the employee for their contact info?