Est. 2011 // Coimbra
RUM
MAGALHÃES
"Spirits, Regrets, and Poorly Aged Photos."
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NO. 01 // 2011
The Bromance Dessert
- 1 oz Vodka
- 1 oz Coffee Liqueur
- 1 oz Cream
- Unresolved Tension
"Two straws required. A celebration of a friendship so close, it genuinely concerns everyone in the room. People don't look at each other like this unless they're married or planning a heist. We were planning neither. Or were we?"
NO. 02 // 2012
The Match-Lit Cupcake
- 1 Tiny Cupcake
- 1 Match (not a candle)
- 3 Founders
- Unlimited Delusion
"November 2nd. Three idiots decided to start a company. The celebration budget? Zero euros. So we lit a match — not even a candle, a match — on a cupcake and called it a party. This is how empires begin: not with champagne and investors, but with pastry, fire hazards, and the blissful ignorance of men who've never read startup failure statistics."
NO. 03 // 2012
The Impenetrable Defense
- 2 oz Beer
- 1 Sugar Cube
- 2 Dashes Angostura
- 0% Success Rate
"Inspired by a night where confidence was catastrophically high and results were absolutely non-existent. Best served cold, like the rejection he received that evening. Her defenses were impenetrable. His dignity did not survive. The beer, however, was excellent."
NO. 04 // 2012
The Queima das Fitas
- Unlimited Beer
- 1 Suit You'll Regret
- 1 Walking Cane
- 0% Dignity
"The academics parade. You dress like you're going to a funeral because tradition demands it. Then tradition hands you seventeen beers and watches you decompose in real time. By the end, one man is horizontal on the ground — not dead, just 'resting' — and another is using a walking cane to literally drag his friend back to civilization like a broken suitcase. We looked so elegant at 2pm. By midnight, we were furniture with pulses."
NO. 05 // 2013
The Unsolicited Selfie
- 1 Stolen Phone
- 3 Weird Faces
- 0 Consent
- Maximum Chaos
"You leave your phone unattended for thirty seconds. Thirty. You come back to seventeen photos of a man making faces that shouldn't be anatomically possible. No explanation. No apology. No remorse. Just pure, unfiltered psychological warfare disguised as friendship. This became a trend. The trend was terrorism. Your camera roll will never recover. Also, I still remember you liking my ex's Instagram pics at 4am at Moelas. We all do."
NO. 06 // 2013
The Stansted Detour
- 2 oz Dark Rum
- 3 oz Ginger Beer
- Lime Wedge
- 400km Bus Ride
"Best consumed while sitting in a plastic chair for six hours, questioning every life decision that led you here. Tastes like exhaustion, motorway burgers, and a pilot who decided the Algarve was 'close enough' to Lisbon. Spoiler: it was not close enough. It was four hundred kilometers of not close enough."
NO. 07 // 2014
The First Birthday
- Cheap Champagne
- 3 Founders Left
- 12 Ex-Employees
- Survivor's Guilt
"March 14th. Whitesmith turns one. We popped champagne and took a photo like a normal company. Look at that photo now — half those people are gone. Not dead, just... elsewhere, doing things that probably pay better. Startups are like lifeboats: you start with a full crew, and every anniversary you take the same photo with fewer faces and more visible wall space. But hey, the founders are still here. Mostly out of spite and an inability to update our LinkedIn."
NO. 08 // 2014
The French Leek
- 2.5 oz Gin
- 0.5 oz Dry Vermouth
- 1 Giant Vegetable Weapon
"For the sophisticated gentleman who understands that in moments of crisis, produce can become weaponry. He grabbed a leek — a leek — and wielded it like Excalibur. Was there a threat? Unclear. Was there a vegetable-based solution? Absolutely. Elegant, absurd, and immortalized on video for reasons we still don't fully understand."
NO. 09 // 2014
The Grandfather's Garden
- 2 oz Aguardente
- Fresh Air
- Plastic Chairs
- Zero Pretension
"March 30th. Most startups celebrate at rooftop bars with overpriced cocktails and people in blazers. We celebrated at Rui's grandfather's house. No dress code. No investors. No bullshit. Just nature, cheap aguardente, plastic chairs, and the kind of humility that comes from knowing you genuinely cannot afford anything else. Honestly? Best parties we ever had. Rooftop bars are for people who peaked early. Grandpa's backyard is forever."
NO. 10 // 2014
The Jorge Jesus
- 1 oz Holy Water
- 1 oz Sacrilege
- 1 Benfica Scarf
- Eternal Damnation
"Halloween. Someone showed up dressed as Jesus Christ. The actual Son of God. Rui saw this and immediately — immediately, without hesitation or moral consideration — simulated offering... services... to our Lord and Savior. Why? Because in his Benfica-poisoned brain, Jorge Jesus the football coach and Jesus of Nazareth are essentially interchangeable deities. The photo exists. God has seen it. Rui will answer for this at the gates."
NO. 11 // 2015
The Severance Package
- 1 Cardboard Box
- Personal Belongings
- Crushed Dreams
- A Face That Says It All
"Look at this man. Look at that face. The downward gaze. The box of office supplies clutched like the last remnants of dignity. This is the exact posture of a man who's just been let go. Little did he know, this was just a rehearsal — AI hadn't even entered the chat yet. The sadness was premature. The real threat was still learning how to write code. Sleep well, mobile developers. Sleep well. (P.S. It's a joke. Mostly.)"
NO. 12 // 2015
The Casual Formal
- 1 Suit You Don't Own
- Borrowed Confidence
- Corporate Cosplay
"We called it 'Casual Day' but everyone showed up in suits. That was the joke. For one glorious afternoon, we looked like a real company — like adults with retirement plans and opinions about interest rates. The photo is framed somewhere. It's a lie, obviously, but it's a beautiful, well-dressed lie. We went back to hoodies the next day."
NO. 13 // 2015
The Double Quiz
- 2 Quiz Nights
- 1 Giant Trophy Cup
- 0 Memory Next Day
- Resting Nets
"Two quiz nights. Same evening. We won a giant trophy cup full of beer and some resting nets — don't ask. By the end, someone had the brilliant idea that Rui, the most destroyed person present, should be the responsible adult to drive his girlfriend home. She lived nearby. He was not nearby to sobriety. The next morning, the entire office showed up holding Coca-Colas like religious artifacts. We called it a day before it started."
NO. 14 // 2015
The Incubator Cup
- 1 Football Trophy
- 1 CEO Lifted
- 22 People Who Can't Play
- Pure Glory
"July. We organized a football tournament for the incubator companies. None of us could play football. Genuinely, not one person. But we won anyway and lifted the CEO like he'd just scored the winning goal in a World Cup final. He hadn't. He mostly stood around looking confused. The guy who organized the tournament? We hired him. That's startup culture: you're bad at sports, you win anyway, you absorb anyone nearby into your company."
NO. 15 // 2015
The Judo Retreat
- 1 Judo Lesson
- 15 People
- 30 Bruises
- Unlimited Energy
"December. First company retreat. Someone — and we still don't know who — decided judo would be excellent team-building. So we learned how to throw each other onto mats. Professionally. The photos from that night are clinically unhinged: people celebrating like we'd just liberated a small country, arms everywhere, facial expressions that belong in a medical journal. Half those people don't work here anymore. But for one night, we were warriors. Beautiful, drunk, completely uncoordinated warriors."
NO. 16 // 2017
Rui's Dreams of Gin
- All The Gin
- 1 Whitesmith Shirt
- 1 Prophecy Written on a Wall
- The Beginning of the End
"At some retreat, someone wrote 'Rui's dreams of gin' on a wall. It was meant as a joke. It was not a joke. Look at this photo. Look at that posture. Even from behind, you can feel the intensity. This is the exact moment a hobby metastasized into a personality disorder. The wall knew. The wall tried to warn us. We laughed. We didn't listen. Now we're all paying for it, one cocktail at a time."
NO. 17 // 2018
The Half-Pipe Prophecy
- 2 oz Dark Rum
- 1 oz Adrenaline
- 1 Skateboard
- Foreshadowed Ligament Damage
"Years before CrossFit destroyed his knee, there were warning signs. At a retreat in Aljezur, this man — a grown adult with responsibilities — decided to roll down a half-pipe on a skateboard. No experience. No fear. No helmet. Just vibes. It was a preview of the athletic overconfidence that would later end his fitness career entirely. The knee was already living on borrowed time."
NO. 18 // 2020
The Douro Merger
- 2 oz Port Wine
- 1 oz Sunset
- 1 Future Wife
- Aggressive Onboarding
"He didn't just co-found a company at Whitesmith — he co-founded a family. She joined as an intern in 2016. He was her supervisor. HR would have had opinions about this, but HR was also just us, so we had no opinions. This photo, taken at sunset in the Douro Valley, is the result of what we can only describe as 'aggressive mentorship.' Some people find love on dating apps. Rui found it during a performance review. The startup grind giveth."
NO. 19 // 2021
The Benfica Tenor
- 1 oz Gin
- 1 oz Campari
- 1 oz Sweet Vermouth
- Imaginary High Notes
"A drink for the man who doesn't ask for the microphone at weddings — he takes it. It's bitter, it's strong, and it pairs perfectly with shattering glassware and screaming Benfica anthems at 3 AM while everyone else just wants to go home. The DJ has given up. The bride is concerned. Rui is just getting started."
NO. 20 // 2023
The Master of Ceremonies
- Unlimited Champagne
- 1 Tuxedo
- A Microphone
- Total Memory Loss
"A dual-layered cocktail. Starts elegant and composed — a man in a tuxedo, hosting the most important ceremony of your life with grace and professionalism. Ends as a blurry, ecstatic mess on the dancefloor with no memory of how he got there. Even wasted, he kept announcing he 'couldn't drink more' because his daughter might be born that night — his wife was at home, very pregnant. She wasn't born that night. He drank more. The photos confirm everything."
The Mixologist
Rui Magalhães
Rum is not just his favorite spirit — it's a lifestyle choice. He destroyed his knee trying to be a CrossFit guy, a phase that lasted exactly as long as it took to impress the woman who's now his wife. Mission accomplished, knee sacrificed.
He writes actual poems. Not cocktail recipes — real poems, with feelings and everything. Disgusting, honestly. But beneath all the rum and the bravado, he's one hell of a father, one hell of a co-founder, and one hell of a friend.