BigCeed Begins — We Stand With Colombia

Our first fruit was supposed to be tea. It's a tent.

The plan we had

Cover illustration — BigCeed / Forest 101 artwork. Not a photograph of the earthquake.

BigCeed was not supposed to begin like this.

It began as a brand for one person's second life.

Forest 101 is IWBFD Studios' long project — twenty years, from August 18, 2026 to August 18, 2046, spent finding and building 101 irreplaceable people: those who have finished one round and are ready to begin another. Not a program with a graduation date. A forest, planted one seed at a time.

It opens with a pilot — Pilot Project No.01, announced on August 18, 2026, New York time. And where we chose to start was with a retired K-pop idol: someone who had known real success, passed through an ending while still young, and was ready to begin again — this time not as a performer, but as a global entrepreneur with a company of their own.

The business we were building with them was cascara — and the brand was BigCeed.

The coffee industry throws away the cherry. The fruit around the bean — the cascara — is discarded as waste, in enormous volume, every harvest. We were building a premium brand that upcycles it: first fruit a single-estate coffee cherry tea from Colombia, made with our partners on the ground there.

The reason we chose it was never only commercial. A discarded cherry, reborn as something people pay for and love — that is the same story as a performer whose first career ended, reborn as a founder. The product is the philosophy, in physical form. New for the olds. Life for death. One seed, many fruits.

That was the plan. Colombia's coffee lands, a retired artist, a discarded cherry, and a brand built out of all three.

We were building it quietly. The plan was to reveal all of it at SXSW 2027 — the book, the product, the people, at once. None of what you are reading was meant to be public for another year.

Then, on August 10, 2026, the land moved.

What happened

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia — the strongest recorded in the country this century. It tore straight through the coffee-growing heartland: Pereira, Manizales, Cali, Quibdo, Armenia. Homes, schools and health centers cracked, leaning, or flattened. Hundreds of aftershocks followed.

Thousands of families cannot go back inside. Some because their homes are gone. Many more because the buildings are still standing but no longer trusted — and one more tremor is one too many. They are sleeping in the open, in cars, under tarps, in the street.

Armenia has been here before. In 1999, almost the same ground, almost the same city. People there remember exactly what this is.

That is the land where BigCeed was being built. Those are the people we were building it with.

So BigCeed begins differently

We are not going to wait until March.

We could have waited. Finished the product, launched the brand properly, revealed it all on a stage in Austin, and sent a donation quietly in the meantime. That would have been the safe sequence, and it was the one we had planned.

We are doing the opposite, and we want to be plain about why and how.

We have no product to sell yet.

So this is not "buy something and we'll donate a portion." There is nothing to buy. Nothing on this page asks for a purchase.

What we do have is a network, a design team, partners on two continents, and a story people follow. That is what we are putting on the table first — ahead of anything we will ever sell, and ahead of our own schedule.

And IWBFD Studios takes nothing from this campaign.

No fee, no commission, no overhead, no expenses recovered. Not one dollar passes through our accounts. We are the introduction, not the intermediary.

BigCeed was always going to begin with an ending turned into an entrance. It just isn't the ending we expected, and it isn't ours.

Why Women for Women

We are supporting Women for Women, a campaign launched by Fundacion Zona J together with IWCA Colombia — the International Women's Coffee Alliance.

Not because it is the most moving story available. Because Zona J already has the list.

Through its program Proyecto El Nido, Zona J has spent years working directly with vulnerable young mothers and their children in Armenia, Quindio — maternal and child health, education, emotional support, parenting, independence. Those relationships were built long before the earthquake. The trust exists. The names exist. The addresses exist.

In a disaster, that infrastructure moves faster than good intentions ever will. Aid arrives quickest through people who were already standing there.

Their most urgent need right now is shelter. Tents. Somewhere for a mother and her child to sleep tonight that is not the street.

One door, open today

Donate directly to Fundacion Zona J: paypal.com/paypalme/zonajnet

The link goes to Zona J's own account. Nothing routes through BigCeed or IWBFD Studios.

Follow the ground reporting directly from the people doing the work: @zonajnet · @proyectoelnido · @iwca.colombia

What comes next

We are working with our Colombian partners right now to confirm what is actually needed and what it actually costs — tents per unit, delivery routes, who receives what, and when. As those numbers come back, we will publish them here. Not a summary. The numbers.

Two further programs are in build.

Brand partners.

Time-boxed commitments from brands — a defined share of sales over a defined window, directed to Women for Women. We have none to announce yet. When we do, we will name them and publish the terms.

Goods.

Original designs made with our entrepreneur candidates and produced with print-on-demand partners, with a fixed share of proceeds to the campaign.

Neither goes live until we can publish the exact share, the exact basis, and a guaranteed minimum. Nothing launches on a promise.

And the search stays open

Forest 101 is not one person and not one pilot. It is 101 people over twenty years — found one at a time, until 2046. Pilot Project No.01 is simply how it begins.

So the search was never a casting call for a single role. It is the door itself, and it does not close. It runs in public, in real time — and it will now run alongside a coffee land that is rebuilding at the same time.

Two kinds of beginning, the same year, the same ground.

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An ending is an entrance. But first, everyone has to make it through the night.

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BigCeed (say "big seed") — upcycled cascara

Forest 101 presents BigCeed · Pilot Project

IWBFD Studios by PaulnJoseph LLC · New York

Project Creator · Paul J. J. Kang · paulnjoseph@iwbfd.com

Fundacion Zona J is a Colombian nonprofit organization.

Contributions are not tax-deductible in the United States