Cultural Food New York, November 2007

As a owner of a small business, I need to attend conventions and Expo like these BUT the booths are so expensive that a small business like mine cannot afford it. Every time I read abt a Expo, I always struggle with this issue of "Need to attend but cannot afford the booth".

Anjali You can easily become show broke and loose your shirt. I see it happen many times. Your best bet is to get media coverage-as that is free advertising! Both print and internet are needed. In the future, well who knows if print will even exist. So mny magazines are suffering from dropping subscription rates, and newspapers-well they are in a serious downward spiral into a black hole. Also perhaps the number one way to "advertise" today is word of mouth! Shanti/Mary-Anne

You are right Shanti. "Word-of-mouth" marketing is the best, cheapest and the most effective. have one satisfied customer and he/she will go and tells his/her experience to 5 other friends. Lot of my customers have come to me via this route. And I think its a very good sign. But to grow more, my products do need more exposure. I need to try and get more media coverage. I am not sure how though.

media kits/press releases, get chef's to endorse the product like Hari did Shanti/Mary-Anne

Manufacturers deal in large bulk quantities. Might not be the business for her, as she is doing small consumer put-ups, but a great business with her sourcingcontacts. If you do a show be sure you can handle a large volumne of orders. Most people who attend these shows are retailers both large and small, manufactures, and of course some media types. Exhibiting at a show is only a small part of the business process. Can you ship within a short time frame or do you need a long lead time for orders? Say you wrote 500 orders ranging from $200 to $5000 each, could you ship? Can you carry the credit? What are your minimums? Do you have a credit policy set up? It isn't just exhibiting. It is indeed a serious commitment and a choice to take your business to an immediate larger scale. Of course then your costs rise and you may make the same amount of profit for 10 fold more work. All things that must be considered. Exhibting is the easy part. Do you want to use sales reps or not, or distributors? That is one of 100 issues that must be considered and weighed and decided upon prior to even doing one show. Approaching retailers in your area is a possible first step or developing a major retailer or catalog account as a base for your business. Of course a major account only can be dangerous as if you loose than zap goes the business. Whereas if you have a 1000 small accounts as abase and you loose a couple, no big deal. BTW reatilers remember they expect a 50% min. discount over your direct to consumer pricing and distribotors around 25% Your product line is an easy cross over of gift and gourmet. Shanti/Mary-Anne

Getting into gift and gourmet sounds interesting. I need to look more into that. I think I am leaning more towards the idea of staying away from distributors and retailers.

AND how much money you have to invest and how long you can carry the business with virtually no income for perhaps 18 months. If investment funds are plentiful-go for it, otherwise do NOT risk your ability to provide for yourself. I have been in the import-wholesale-retail-mail order catalog business for over 20 years. I was Director of a large wholesale importer as well as National Sales Manager for them before that (in gifts and gourmet), then I was VP of Merchandising and Marketing which included designing products, their packaging, and sourcing for manufacturing for a large mail order catalog group (gift-gourmet-home decor arena). My background is in speciality markets not mass merchants. Your product line certainly isn't for the mass market like Wallmart. Perhaps such as a William Sonoma could be a customer in time as your infrastructure could accomodate their lofty demands. I still think you need a good customer base to build upon - a mixture of direct sales as you are doing now plus a few geographially non-competing retail accounts. Hey in time you could do private label for some of the foodie retailers. I am not trying to dissuade you from any market-just to caution you to consider carefully all the ramifications and go forward wisely that is unless you have endless funds to play with. It is always different when youare a large corporation and test a new product when you have the reputation and distribution in place as Tamaro has i.e. Steve's employer a very large and successful high volumne player in the grocery business which is quite a different market. It is high volumne and low margins, whereas a speciality gourmet item such as yours has higher margins much closer to he gift industry and far lower volumne for sure. There is one manufacturing segment that is also specaility that could be a perfect target customer! Let's take this off iFood.TV as I am sure it is a real bore to 99.9% here. Shanti/Mary-Anne

I need to get in touch with you Mary-Ann. I can learn a lot from you. Will send you a private message. Anjali

yes media kits work wonders! Free endorsement is great. The media kit needs a professional presentation. We'll talk! I have done so much of this over the years. All began when I was VP of BIA Cordon Bleu 20 years back and I spent as much as I made VBG Shanti/Mary-Anne