Springfield Farmers Market, June 24th

So weather.com said there will be thunderstorms in Springfield starting at 9 am, more at 12 noon, again at 3 pm and getting worse by 6 pm. OK fine, we’ll go anyways and sell some soggy kettle corn to the hardcore. I bring enough supplies to have a record day of sales during a typhoon.

We get there and setup. No rain, it’s a perfect day. Lines are starting to form every few minutes, Steve and I can’t even stop to get a bite to eat. I start hoping that it’ll rain so we can take a break. They continue to buy the stuff, I’m paddling like crazy to keep up.

We run out at 5 o’clock, an hour before closing. Not a drop of precipitation anywhere. We would’ve had a record day if I had brought more oil. (We ran through 9 jugs.) Now we’re seeing a lot of sad faces. Some kid even started to cry that he didn’t get this weeks kettle corn. God I hate weather.com.

Steve found this cartoon in the newspaper.

Wayland Farmers Market, June 25th

We had popped here last year on the last day of the market. Peg, the market manager was all psyched to have us back and hopefully be there this year. I had explained that I also had a corporate job where I sat in traffic for an hour and a half just to GET into Boston, stayed in a windowless basement room and edited insurance videos for 8 hours, then got back into traffic and sat there for another hour and a half just to get home. Thus, I couldn’t make kettle corn on EVERY Wednesday because I need to maintain my other income. She wanted to know what was wrong with me. She also had used a sign for our spot with read “Velma’s Wicked Good Kettle Corn”. I pointed out her error and she felt bad for the screw up, even though “wicked good” is correct improper Bostonian usage.

So this Farmers Market is about the same size as the Framingham one. It’s nestled right next to a busy street and is located in an upscale area. It’s associated with the Russells’ Garden center in Wayland, Massachusetts. I didn’t realize it at first, but there’s about 50 employees who work there, and once they started breathing in the kettle corn “fumes”, they all had to have a bag.

Eh…we did barely OK. (2 and a half jugs of oil) The Framingham Farmers market was like this before we got known in the area. I’m sure if we stuck with it, we could get a pretty loyal following for this area. Thing is, it would probably take a years worth of popping for it to really start to pay off. If I cross off Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays off my corporate schedule, I’ll have nothing to fall back on when winter comes.

Framingham Farmers Market, June 26th

Another grey and kind of rainy day. (I didn’t even bother to look at weather.com) The interesting news was last night we got 2 emails. Somebody from the Boston Globe wants to do a food story on us. Another person in San Francisco wants to do a another kettle corn story. I guess kettle corn is the latest trend in food. I thought it’s been a “trend” for the past 10 years.

The Boston Globe photographer showed up today and took a bunch of “snaps” of us doing our thing. I guess we’ll be speaking with the Globe reporter tomorrow. I should be speaking with the San Francisco reporter later tonight. I’ll definitely post the articles here once I get ‘em. Fox news was also here shooting some footage of one of the vegetable guys. I’m convinced there’s a big news agency somewhere that notifies all the other news outlets on June 25th that Farmers Market season started, thus, they should do something on it.

We did alright for a drizzly day. (almost 5 oils sold.) We’re getting solid customer feedback. Many people are now buying a couple of bags at a time. This is the same buying curve we experienced with Springfield when that started to pick up on us last year.

So how do you like that, they remembered us! (Either that, or the mental kettle corn groove we dug into their minds.) We had a pretty busy day at the Framingham Farmers Market - 5 oils sold. We use jugs of corn oil as a measurement of how much we popped, since we always start with unopened containers. I guess sticking with this farmers market all last year is starting to pay off this year. (Note to anyone who is reading this and is in the kettle corn biz. There’s money to be made by building slow and steady at these smaller weekly events.)

We had done some online marketing this past week, and even though it didn’t impact our sales that much, it shows that it works and that it takes time. I had made this poster earlier in the week and we intended on finding all the bulletin boards within a 3 mile radius of this farmers market and slapping them up there. Craigslist.org has a section on local events, so I posted one there in the Massachusetts Metrowest section. I had tried sticking on into the FREE section, but they don’t allow “promotional” items. Eh, I tried.

Since we’re actually GIVING something away, I thought we should take a crack at sending an email to anyone on myspace.com who were local to the Framingham Farmers Market. Velma thought we were entering the world of “spam”, but I thought that it fell into the category of “news”, PLUS we were giving something tangible away for free, no strings attached. Who wouldn’t want to know about that?

So how do you find people on myspace.com who are only local to you? Simple. Go to Google and enter exactly this:

“female - framingham” site:myspace.com

(Show omitted results)  This means I’m looking for any female who has a profile page that says that they’re from Framingham ONLY on the website myspace.com. Do the same thing for males and pick the town you want. Obviously you already need a page on myspace to send a message to someone on there. I think we found about 80 people, got 12 or so positive emails back from them and one person showed up and claimed a free sample bag. Foolishly she starting eating the bag there, compelling her to BUY a bag when she was done. Normally when marketing stuff, 1 percent return on a mailing is expected, 3 percent is good. It didn’t take us 100 “spams” to get a sale, and many people said that they’d be coming down at some point.

Speaking of sales - we were moved out from under our nice shady spot and were stuck at the end of the row of tents. I guess some DPW guy was obsessed with the new trees they had planted next to the road and they didn’t want us anywhere near them. OK fine. We were next to the frozen beef tent that sells high quality meats. Velma got the impression that they were getting annoyed that no one wanted to pay $6 a pound for high quality beef, yet MANY people were willing to shell out 6 bucks for a bag of our crap. (My words.) I guess I would be annoyed with mankind too.

The Framingham Farmers Market never ignited like Springfield did for us. We did consistent but not great business last year. It picked up a little in the summer months, but tapered off as the market drew to a close. (Unlike Springfield where we kept getting more customers as the year went on.) Velma and I like the location, we get to sync up with a bunch of our buddies who live in this area every Thursday. I had gone to high school in Framingham, so I occasionally meet up with someone who I knew from this area.

At the moment, the market only has 6 vendors (including us.) We had a bunch of repeat customers from last year, so at least sales weren’t completely dismal. The years market is run by Elizabeth Aurilio. She seems like a hot shit, so this year outta be fun. I’ve got a plan to help promote this location and try to ignite some business. My best customers are from office buildings where they buy multiple bags for everyone in the office. I figure by targeting these types of locations with flyers, I can remind these people that someone should make the trip to the farmers market and buy their weekly supply of “kettle crack”. I’ll be posting more on this once I get the marketing material created. I’m also wondering if I can promote this event online with myspace or facebook. I thought you can do a search for myspace members via their location, so I might try to do a little “spam” reminder to these people of our farmers market.  We’ll see how that pans out.