Digital investor Ellevest sells a $23 'buy the f---ing latte' cup

Former Wall Streeter Sallie Krawcheck railed against a common personal finance trope encouraging people to stop buying their morning coffee in an op-ed published by Fast Company in May.

Krawcheck's company Ellevest, a digital investing platform for women, recently began selling a $23 ceramic cup emblazoned with the phrase “buy the f---ing latte” on its website.

“You have our permission to drink whatever you like from this cup: latte, iced latte, unicorn latte, green tea matcha latte, chai tea latte, water, whiskey, feminist power. No judgment,” the product description reads.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For every personal finance figurehead encouraging young people to forgo their morning coffee and invest the cash instead, there is at least one, louder voice telling them to just “buy the f---ing latte.”

As of late, personal finance experts the world over seem to have an opinion about whether or not skipping your pricey morning beverage will lead to more wealth.

In an op-ed published by Fast Company in May, former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck railed against what she called “patronizing financial advice” in financial expert David Bach's latest book “The Latte Factor” and other popular culture (namely, Chase Bank's tweet).

To drive the message home, Krawcheck's company Ellevest, a digital investing platform for women, has begun selling a cheeky coffee cup on its website, artfully emblazoned with the phrase “buy the f---ing latte.” The 11-ounce, ceramic to-go cup retails for $23.

“You have our permission to drink whatever you like from this cup: latte, iced latte, unicorn latte, green tea matcha latte, chai tea latte, water, whiskey, feminist power. No judgment,” the product description reads.

Not only does saving an extra $5 a day on your morning beverage add up to far less than the $1 million savers are led to believe it does, Krawcheck wrote in the op-ed, the latte trope is “dripping with its feminine connotations as a milky, sweet, steamed, flippant luxury.”

She continued: “But, as infuriating as it is to be patronized, that's not the biggest issue. All this nonsense about lattes and shoes is shifting the attention — and thus the blame — for the underlying systemic money challenges women face, to the women themselves.” Krawcheck goes on to list the various ways women are shortchanged in modern society: the gender pay gap, the pink tax, and the investing gap, to name a few.

Krawcheck calls the investing gap her “personal crusade” — an initiative that Ellevest is tackling head on by helping women identify and establish financial goals, invest strategically for those goals, and track their progress.

“When the status quo isn't meeting women's needs, it deserves to be disrupted, and that's what this platform created by women for women aims to do,” said Melinda Gates, who is an investor in Ellevest, during the startup's most recent funding round. “Women's lives and realities are different than men's, and I think we'll see more and more of a demand for products designed to reflect that.”

Learn more about investing with Ellevest »

Read more:

Wall Street alum Sallie Krawcheck just raised $34 million for her investing platform — here's what it's like to use it

Sallie Krawcheck, once the 'most powerful woman on Wall Street,' says her startup Ellevest doesn't 'empower' women — because that's not what they need

Most traditional investing advice fails to take women's pay gaps and longer lifespans into account — Ellevest is changing that

How to start investing at any age, according to financial planners who know