July 2008 Archives

Because it's just not enough for us to work our butts off starting and growing ONE business, this past weekend it was time for the triumphant public debut of our other business: Beowulf Mead.  Josh and I set up a booth in the "premium wine garden" at the San Anselmo Art & Wine Festival and poured generous samples of Orange Blossom and Blackberry Flower mead for about 200 people. Our booth looked great--really professional IMHO--and we had seriously sexy marketing materials thanks to our buddy Blair at O'Neill Design Group. (We also had matching t-shirts and even magnets and bumper stickers...the magnets were popular but the bumperstickers were decidedly not.) It was lighter traffic than we'd hoped, but still really educational for us--instant market research! We talked ourselves hoarse (largely because we were often shouting over the live jazz band jamming their hearts out about 20 feet away from us) explaining what mead was and how ours was different and what each varietal tasted like. Though some people just didn't (or wouldn't) like it, we gained a number of enthusiastic converts and I think we did a terrific job of re-introducing "the drink of the ancients".

The truth is, I *like* working booths and talking to people. I love being able to educate and offer up new, delicious experiences to others. I only wish I'd been able to do more of it--I spent big chunks of time both days wrangling kids so that Josh could be the primary salesperson (which he's much better at than me, because he's the meadmaster!) It's tempting to go spend lots of time trying to figure out how to get the appropriate paperwork to do this again at other festivals and events, but then there's that pesky other business to run...and speaking of which I'd better go work on the Beowulf website!