So much has happened since I came home from deployment. Besides the basics of moving into a new home, painting, remodeling the kitchen (yeah it was A LOT of hard work), I learned to make artisanal gelato and launched my business. In true Thereasa Black fashion I wasn’t satisfied with doing things like everyone so I made a few changes.
Starting off with a Bang
I was supposed to come home and focus on launching my business. Instead, I came home to a request from my Naval Reserve unit to come on full-time for the summer. I figured I could do both and did BUT IT WAS HORRIBLE.
After spending an entire month and half home with my daughter and never leaving her side, I went back to work. This was tough on her. She thought that I wasn’t going to come back for her EVERYDAY. Whenever I picked her up from daycare she said, “Mommy, you came back!” That literally killed me.
In the month of June I focused on getting all of the proper licenses to have my home kitchen certified so that I could make my gelato out of my home, I bought my machine, and went to a training for making gelato making. By July 6th I was ready to go, though my gelato machine arrived late and a installation was a you know what. But I did it after an all-nighter leading into my first day at the market.
My weekdays were 5am start, home by 6pm, and sleep by about 12am. Except of course of Friday’s where I was lucky if I got 20 minutes of sleep before I had to head to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning. The market ended at 12pm and I immediately drove an hour to the winery and sold there until 10pm. This was my schedule until September.
Draining doesn’t even begin to explain how horrible that was. The greatest benefit of this experience was the feedback that I was able to get from customers. I was able to see which crowds wanted which flavors and what worked and didn’t work. For example, the farmer’s market crowd loved my sorbets that contained vegetables, I was lucky if the winery crowd even took a sample of those flavors.
I partnered with a small deli in Fairfax Virginia for a while. By partnered I mean I started selling out of their shop and by selling I mean that I stood in the store for hours and no one every came to purchase anything from me. This was my first lesson on the fact that LOCATION IS EVERYTHING.
I thought that it would be a good opportunity because it was close to George Mason. The problem, it wasn’t close enough. I realized that students weren’t going to walk from the main campus area where they had plenty of food, all the way to a deli in order to buy gelato.
Also, no one even knew I was there because I had no signage. Valuable lessons learned.
These customers also re-enforced that the non-farmer’s market crowd DOESN’T WANT VEGGIES IN THEIR ICE CREAM!
Winter is Coming
Sales about doubled every month, but winter was coming and I was selling a cold product outside. I knew that the next season wouldn’t be good for me. I began to look for alternative locations. I focused on pop-up locations and malls.
By October my sales were so slow because of the whether that I decided that I would take November off to find a realistic, indoor option.
By early November I still hadn’t found anything, but I was signed on to do a wedding. I planned to work with the company Hungry to do catering jobs for them, but after the were so excited after the tasting, they didn’t move forward. I actually never heard anything from them, but this was true even when I was trying to set up the initial meeting with them.
I found a location by mid-November and it was perfect. I began to make changes to my business model in order to accommodate a winter crowd and put all my resources into furnishing a store.
New Face
I was accepted into the Chobani Veteran Incubator and learned that my packaging and logo needed a redesign.
Around this time, I also decided that sweetening with agave nectar instead of cane sugar wasn’t enough. The idea was that I wanted my product to be healthier than regular ice cream, so I went on the search for a healthy sweetener instead of just an alternative.
I discovered, date syrup. It was the answer to my prayers. The other answer was a member Chobani’s team volunteered to redesign my packaging and logo.
Vista print gives you the option to purchase 3 different versions of the logo for $20, I asked my friend to create the final product using my design. After some tweaks on my end and about 3 months (It’s ok, I’m on deployment, I could afford to be patient), the final product was finished.
The problem with working with someone who is volunteering is that they don’t make the project a priority and they may or may not finish. In my case, she never finished everything, but I was able to finish it off by myself (thank you Photoshop). I learned to use Photoshop back in my college days when I was majoring in advertising.
All of the images here are my final designs that I completed after a pretty good head start from the designer at Chobani. I then took my campaign logo and did this:
