Instagram’s ‘Men & Coffee’: Beard Edition

Have you ever been sitting in your kitchen, eating breakfast, and thought the perfect way to cap off your meal is to look at some dudes drinking coffee? No? Well more than 200,000 people disagree with you, and you’re about to find out why.

Cue @menandcoffee, an Instagram account created by 25 year-old Vancouver-based Alex Tooby.

“I had a girlfriend over one night, and we were drinking wine and hanging out, and we were talking about how a guy with a cup of coffee is just super attractive,” she says.

“The next day I looked on Instagram and saw that no one was doing anything like that, so I figured I’d jump on it.”

Tooby says she began by finding pictures around the internet that fit the bill for the account, often times scrolling through Tumblr and Pintrest to track down the perfect shots to post.

“As the hashtag #menandcoffee started taking off, people started submitting their own pictures and I started featuring those submissions,” she says.

“It all took off relatively quickly.”

An understatement if there ever was one. Tooby started Men and Coffee in November, and has already amassed 226,000 followers. A feat, she says, aided in part by press coverage from the UK.

“In May, I got an email from the Daily Mail UK saying that someone had seen my account and wanted to write an article about it, so I said sure, not really thinking about what impact that would have on it,” Tooby says.

“As soon as that article got published, it blew up and I gained thousands more followers. It definitely took me by surprise.”

A Communications graduate from Royal Roads University and a Digital Communications graduate from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, Tooby also owns and operates her own social media marketing company called Instagram Marketing. But with that being said, she says the success of Men and Coffee wasn’t planned or calculated.

“I started it because I knew people would like it, and there was something special about it,” she says.

“I didn’t know what would come of it exactly but I knew whatever it was, I’d take hold of it, which is what I’m doing now.”

Tooby also says that while the general idea of handsome dudes drinking a cup of dark roast attracts attention, she sees a noticeable uptick in action when she posts a photo featuring a beard.

“I post a picture of a guy with a beard, and it definitely gets a lot more attention. Men are always going to have facial hair, so it’s more than a trend, I can’t see it dying off.”

She goes on to explain that an idea like hers owes a lot of its success to the social media platforms available in today’s tech age.

“This never would have been a thing back in the day. I have friends with jewelry lines and things like that, and they didn’t have this kind of platform [Instagram] a few years ago, so it opens a lot of doors,” she says.

“You can start networking and collaborating with other people in your niche, so the opportunities really are endless.”

The success of Men and Coffee has led Tooby to her latest project – she is currently creating and preparing to self-publish a Men and Coffee coffee table book that she plans to have available by the holidays.

“I’m trying to give my fans what they want, and since I can’t send them a man to their front door, I figure this book is the next best thing,” she says with a laugh.

“It’ll be a ‘best of’, but primarily from the early days so some of the more recent photos from the last few months won’t be in it, which leads to the possibilities of more editions.”

But gentleman, fear not – Tooby has also created a partner account for us called (quite appropriately) Women and Coffee.

“I actually made it a month or two after I made Men and Coffee, I figured it would be good to have the partner account,” she says.

“It’s still on autopilot right now, but it’s slowly growing.”

So guys, if you think you’ve got the goods, check out @menandcoffee on Instagram, or go to menandcoffee.com, and send your best coffee pics Tooby’s way. And if you’re in the mood to ogle attractive girls drinking a freshly brewed cup of Joe, head over to @womenandcoffee.