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Welcome to the Community Call Podcast.
I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET & NOSH, here with my co-hosts Monica Watress and Mike Schneider.
If you're enjoying the show, please follow and review us on Apple Podcasts, or your listening platform of choice.
Let me ask you both, Monica and Mike, is it your birthday soon, or was it recently?
No, but I got to go to Market Basket yesterday, so it felt like my birthday.
Did you really go to Market Basket?
What was one of the treats that you brought back?
I got some pizza shells.
Boboli?
No, not Boboli.
I don't know what brand they are, but they're like one that I've only seen at Market Basket.
Are they good?
Yeah.
Nice, nice.
That actually gave me a little tingle.
Your spider sense?
Yeah, that tingled my Market Basket sense.
Well, I was asking you if it was either of your birthdays, because I have two carrot cake cupcakes sitting right here.
Monica?
My birthday was last week, actually.
Oh, well, then it's totally-
It's Monica's birthday.
Because it takes more than a day to celebrate someone as awesome as Monica.
I mean, it takes like a whole month, yeah.
29 days.
And I didn't get enough advance notice, so I made you some carrot cake cupcakes for your birthday using Bake Me Healthy's new carrot cake mix.
Kimberly Lau is one of our favorite people.
She was actually one of our first Slack community members ever.
You can join us there at slack.bevnet.com.
And I wanted to try these out.
Monica, I know that you tried to waffle these, so I think we should do a little taste testing and recipe sharing and see how these are.
This is the ultimate collab.
A little waffle and community call.
This is one with frosting.
Okay.
And that's just a regular cream cheese frosting.
And then this is without, can I ask you something?
Does it really annoy you when you go, do you ever go to a blog to find a recipe and you're trying?
It is one of my most annoying annoyances in life.
Anyways.
And they're like, oh, they talked to you about, yeah, did you know that the carrot was invented by?
Yeah, I don't freaking care.
I need to make cream cheese frosting.
The carrot was invented by Warner Brothers, Bugs Bunny, in 1923.
I know, I know.
That's not why I'm here.
So the carrot is part of the public domain now.
Good.
So this was the waffle.
I resisted eating it over the past hour and a half since I actually made it.
It turned out beautifully.
It looks beautiful.
Yeah, it looks gorgeous.
It made my kitchen smell really nice, and there's some spice and some cinnamon to it.
And I gotta say, this was made to waffle.
Are you carrot cake fans?
I love carrot cake.
Me too.
And I think it's a pretty polarizing thing for people.
You go to, you know, people are like, I don't want carrot cake.
I hate carrot cake.
Carrot cake's disgusting.
I think it's like, I think it's heavenly.
Is it the raisins?
I don't know.
I think it may be the carrots.
The promise of it might be healthy, but it's not.
No, it's definitely not.
I love it so much though.
I'm really here for the cream cheese frosting.
I think that's my favorite part of the carrot cake.
Oh, totally, totally.
You know what I wanted to make a cream cheese frosting with Nut and Ordinary's cream cheese because they came to the BevNET offices and made I think maybe the most delicious cream cheese frosting I've ever had, but Market Basket was out of the product, so instead I just used Cabot.
I know, I know, it was really sad.
She does a really nice job with the spice, absolutely, and she gives you some ideas for inclusions you can put in there, so I put the raisins in, and I don't think it's carrot cake without the raisins.
It's so M-word.
Yeah, it really is.
Super M-word.
Yep, it is, it is.
Even out of the waffle maker, it's M-word.
I believe this is made with upcycled carrot powder.
Which is pretty cool.
Upcycled carrot powder.
This is gluten-free?
Gluten-free, top-nine allergen-free, refined sugar-free, nut-free, vegan.
I mean, what more could you want?
Melissa, yours wasn't vegan, though.
You made it with cow's milk, right?
I did make it with cow's milk.
That's all we had.
I mean, I think it definitely came out well.
I used milked oats by Elmhurst 1925.
That's one of my favorite dairy-free milk alternatives.
And it came out really, really great.
Who is this legend, Kimberly, who makes these gluten-free, M-word carrot cake delights?
Kimberly is awesome.
I got to meet her at Expo East last year.
And she's actually formerly a marketing and product development executive in the cosmetics industry.
And then she encountered a number of health challenges that caused her to eliminate certain allergens from her diet and was always a lover of baking, has a couple of kids to bake for, and decided to commercialize these mixes that she'd been making at home.
Wow, everybody has their bitten by a radioactive spider story and that's Kimberly's.
That's a great story.
It really is.
Yeah, and she's certainly on the upcycled foods train.
As Monica mentioned, this product has upcycled carrot powder, sunflower protein.
In her fudgey brownie, she uses upcycled coffee cherry flour, which is super cool.
So she's joining the ranks of brands like Spudsy, Blue Stripes, Renewal Mill, who she actually partners with.
Monica, I'm sure you see this coming across your desk all the time.
What are your thoughts on brands that sort of center their proposition around upcycled ingredients and make it part of what they stand for?
It's an interesting trend, because I think a lot of consumers still don't understand what upcycling means.
But what I love about this, not just from a sustainability standpoint, but from a nutrition standpoint, a lot of ingredients that would be waste streams that are being captured and brought back into the food system, are actually pretty nutrient-dense.
If you think about spent beer grains, it's actually really high in protein and fiber, because in the beer making process, all the sugar is pulled out, so the remaining flour is pretty healthy for you.
These say they're specifically ugly carrots.
It says made from ugly carrots that usually get discarded.
They're probably like the ones that look like a penis.
Right, or they have the cross legs, which I think are the cute ones.
Those are cute.
I think that's what they mean.
But the sunflower protein is the pulp leftover from making sunflower oil.
To your point, Monica, the coffee cherry flower has, I think, just as much if not more nutrients than the coffee bean.
So I was looking into the coffee cherry flower, and the coffee cherry is the fruit that surrounds the coffee beans.
It's usually thrown away, but it has, I read, more iron than fresh spinach, more protein than kale, more potassium than banana.
We're just throwing it out so we can drink coffee.
They may cast care of tea with that product too.
It's like coffee waste now making tea.
There's so many good upcycled products.
I'm just still floored by the origin story here that you had this challenge, and you overcame it like this.
It's so good.
It really is.
And she's certainly one of our favorite community members.
I love to see her social media.
She not only posts so many of the wins that they've had in demos, but I also certainly appreciate when she posts how difficult things are as an entrepreneur because that's of course a part of it.
Kimberly, thanks so much for sending us the new Bake Me Healthy Carrot Cake Mix.
We thoroughly enjoyed making and waffling it.
Another brand we see so often popped up on LinkedIn and social media with CPG Adventures is Belgian Boys.
This was actually the first community call we ever did with Anouck Gotlib and Tracy Motz.
They were talking about a topic that's very prescient right now, Expo West.
When I think of a brand that's always memorable at the show, it's certainly Belgian Boys, whether it's the swag, their booth, their team energy.
So here Belgian Boys shares their scrappy tips for standing out at the show, saving money and the things nobody plans for, but should, please enjoy.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
Let's get started.
Anouck and Tracy, welcome to our Community Call.
So how many Expo West is this for you now?
Did we say six or so?
Yeah, our first one was back in 2016.
We missed a couple with the pandemic and this will be our sixth one.
So clearly you guys know what you're talking about.
But you also remember what it's been like to be a bootstrap brand and, you know, trying to pull off an Expo West show at the early stages when cash is really, you know, cash is really at a premium.
I think $30,000 is the bare minimum that folks might be able to spend on an Expo West exhibit.
And even that sort of stretching it a little bit.
When you have a show like this, you want to make the most of your money.
How do you promote your exhibit?
How do you get all of the buyers, investors, influencers to know where you are and what you're doing?
So I think we just make use of all of our available channels.
We treat it as if it's any other product campaign.
If we were launching a product, how would we tell people about it?
It's that important to the business.
So we use our email list, we use our social channels, we use our LinkedIn network, of course.
We're now really lucky to be at the stage where we do have a lot of inbound asks.
So people are coming to us to see if we're going to be at Expo and if they can stop by the booth.
So we are pretty rigorous about maintaining meeting schedules and putting together a calendar that makes sense for the whole team.
But a little trick that is just another added reminder is that we have our entire team, whether they're attending or not, put a banner in their email signature.
So for a period of two to three weeks before the show, every single email that goes out from the company has a reminder that we'll be at Expo, we'll be at the booth, people can stop by even if they don't have a meeting or an appointment to see us.
That's so smart, and it's so free.
It's so free.
You know, I would also say on LinkedIn, there's a lot of people that are going to start to talk about Expo, like this call, right?
Like I would say, engage with those posts, say, we're gonna be at the booth, whatever, whatever.
We'd love to meet you there, because then your name, your brand pops up, you know how LinkedIn works, and just engage, show that you're active, you will pop up on buyers' feeds, et cetera.
So just put yourself out there, I would say.
Can you talk a little bit about building hype?
That's another thing that you guys do so well.
How do launches play into building hype for a show like this?
And how do you time them to make the most of it?
The timing is not an accident.
And I know not every brand can kind of line up their big news so that it feeds so beautifully into Expo.
But we've been really lucky both of these two years to have a product launch in February, and then it leads right into Expo.
So we have this moment where we're super visible.
We have this great new product that people are eager to try.
We've blasted out on all of our channels.
We've run social campaigns and influencer campaigns about this product, and it feeds right into why people want to come to see.
We've really given them a reason.
And I think there's been so much FOMO around this that people are chomping at the bit.
Our customer service email is full of people asking, where can I get it?
Where can I find it?
Where can I see it?
Can I order it from you direct?
We had one person ask if we could just like send them a case and they could pay us over Venmo.
So things being able to do something big that makes people really curious to come see your brand right before Expo has really served us.
And I want to jump in here, say that right before Expo is not the two days before Expo.
Like two days before Expo, there's going to be so much news.
Everyone's going to launch something new.
Everyone's going to want to get the attention.
You're going to get lost in the crowds.
Like this is starting first, in my opinion, is leading up to Expo.
And most people use the real estate of the first week of March.
But you need to build hype.
And it doesn't happen in the eighth first days of March before Expo.
So just put it out there.
Don't be secretive about your innovation because the more you put it out there, the more you speak, the more you can amplify it in the days and weeks leading up to Expo.
I know I speak for our editorial team when I say that the number of press releases that they receive the five days before the show starts is incredible.
And to be able to sift through all of those and make the most of them is really difficult.
So would you say that, say, three weeks before the show, that's when you really want to start leaning in on PR and making the most of your news so you're not competing and kind of conflicting with all of the noise that's out there?
For sure.
Drop it today, drop it tomorrow.
Don't wait.
Okay, excellent, excellent advice.
Let's move on to another burning question that I think I've heard from every brand that I've spoken with lately, and that's inventory planning.
How do you plan on how much product to bring with you to sample?
You know, it's an expensive process to ship it, to store it, and then, of course, there's the cost of the product itself.
How do you figure those numbers?
So it's an imperfect science.
We're not gonna, unfortunately, hand you some magic formula that's gonna let everybody plug in a number.
But we learned from trial and error, from going, as Anouck mentioned, six years in a row.
So we've been able to kind of look at how much we used in the past, and I guess the gift that we would pass on to everybody here today is that in Hall E, you can expect to give away somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 samples, depending on your placement, depending on the size of your sample.
Obviously, a lot of things go into that number, but that's kind of where we've landed.
But we're also bringing other things along that by no means are logistically easy to get there, but are really important.
So hidden innovations that live in a refrigerator that we want to show to just a small number of buyers, limited time packaging that might be arriving.
So we have kind of our main sampling item, but then we're bringing a lot of other things in smaller quantities to make sure that if we hit the right person for it, we have it on hand.
Yeah.
And I would also say, you're already spending so much money on this expo list, right?
Product cost, that's not where the big money lies, in my opinion.
Better have more than too little, right?
Just everyone's a consumer.
At the end of the show, either you give it to people that live local, so you're in their household.
And if not, you do something good and it goes to a food bank, it goes to a donation, and that's some good as well.
But you don't want to be there after day one and say, oh, we're out of samples, because the logistics, if you are out of samples, are harder than the logistics of before, shipping a few more cases on your pallet that's already going there is easier than then calling the office, what store has it, oh, they don't have enough, I need to go drive, get, and don't like just ship a bit more.
Anouck, you commented that one of the things that Belgian Boys does and has done is to make sure you know which retailers are close to the show, make sure they have inventory of the product you're going to be sampling.
And you say you even call the store and make sure that they know you're coming and you may be needing to raid the shelves.
Listen, you never know, right?
Like we live in a world where supply chain trucks break down, knock on wood, everything goes well and you have your samples.
If you do sample and your palette doesn't arrive, don't freak out, happen to everybody.
It will be one of those stories that one day you will laugh about, okay?
Don't freak out, but yes, you can proactively prepare yourself for that, right?
If you have local distribution in California, make sure you already know in advance which stores close to the exhibit have your product.
If they have it, call them up saying, hey, there's a big convention, a big event.
You should order a few more cases.
So you make sure there's safety stocks in those stores as well.
Another tip I would say is yes, we ship the palette to the warehouse, but we've also shipped cases of products to the hotel like UPS, backup, just in case, you never know.
And worst case, you just give it to people working at the hotel and spread the mission about your brand.
So just have like some backup plans in case something doesn't arrive, hoping you don't have to activate that plan.
But if you do, you will be very, very grateful that you thought about it in advance.
Something that we've also learned to piggyback on what Anouck just said, those extra samples arriving at the hotel, along with swag or whatever else you have there, you're going to need to call on a favor from your hotel.
Absolutely guaranteed.
Like, have things that make people smile because you're going to need to give stuff away and ask for a favor.
Tracy, do you remember last year at the, what happened at dinner with Liam, where we found Liam?
All right, we got to hear about this.
So we were at dinner the night before Expo, and we were like, who's going to cook the samples?
Yeah, we're going to change, but I don't know.
And we were having dinner and we're like, what are you doing tomorrow?
Do you want to join us for Expo?
To our server.
And so Liam, from our sushi restaurant at the hotel, joined us and he's joining us this year again.
So they were like, great, and he was like, what is that?
We're like, well, we could use the extra head.
Yeah, exactly.
And honestly, when we were like, should we ask him, it sounded so ridiculous.
But honestly, Expo, just ask, just do the thing that seems ridiculous if you have a problem to be solved, because it can all be solutioned out at the last minute.
Sometimes the most ridiculous things turn out to be the most effective and fun.
Who do you use for sampling?
Have you ever used an outsourced sampling agency, or have you always kept it in-house or finding someone at a restaurant?
We've always kept it in-house.
Liam is our new sampling outsourced agency.
Liam and friends this year.
Anouck, you were talking a little bit about shipping.
And Tracy, I know you have some thoughts on this too.
Are there any sort of hot tips or an inside scoop on maybe the most cost-effective way to get all of your products to the show?
Well, the most cost-effective is to get it in early.
And Tracy has the dates, right?
So there's some details here.
So there's advanced shipping and there's direct shipping.
And depending on the hall, you might not be able to direct ship to the show.
So if you're in the North Hall, you can't direct ship.
Unless you are shipping frozen or cold product, then you always have to direct ship.
So if you have a choice, advanced shipping is best, but you might not have a choice.
If you're shipping cold or frozen, has to go to direct.
And if you're in the North Hall with ambient product, you also have to go direct.
Or excuse me, you cannot go direct.
You have to go advanced.
So just work with your rep, if this all sounds confusing and you're not sure which one you fall into and you haven't figured it out yet.
Because it will depend on the type of product you have and whether it's cold or ambient and where you are specifically in the show.
And basically you will get charged.
It's called material handling.
For those who, this is your first Expo S, you think you're gonna pay only for the boot, but then you get a bill for material handling.
What is material handling?
That is every pound that gets shipped into Expo S, either advanced warehouse or direct to show.
You need to pay for them to receive that and bring it to your boot, right?
If you ship it to the warehouse, it's cheaper than if you ship it direct to the show.
So if you still have time based on what hole you're at, ship it to the warehouse that needs to arrive at that warehouse before the deadline.
So that's a little hack that we've learned over the years.
And if you're at your booth and you're missing your product, is your best bet to contact your show rep?
Yes.
You contact, you go ask nicely, you say, I'm here, I wanna set up.
I think my balance right over there, all the way in the back, but would really appreciate if you bring it up.
I would, so now I'd like to ask you a little bit about swag.
The swag is just off the charts with Belgian Boys.
I think that I still have a little pink pouch that you guys had to keep my phone wires in, that kind of thing.
How do you think about what will make the best swag to give out at the show?
And how do you scale that according to budget understanding that what you're going to be able to be capable of is a bootstrap brand may change as you sort of grow as a brand?
I think when we started, I think the first trade shows we did, we did the traditional pens and stickers, right?
Then we went into tote bags, and you spend already on swag.
But then it's about asking those questions.
What are the things that are going to stay in people's households so that they're going to be reminded about your brand as a consumer?
You know, you sharing that you still have that pouch, that pouch is probably from like before COVID, so four years, five years ago.
That's the ROI on that pouch instead of the pen that you will probably have lost, right?
Did these amazing French tote purses, people came and said, where is that purse, right?
I get pictures still today from people from the industry with their kids and the purses.
We are in our consumer's households.
And that's how Belgian Boys view swag, different than, okay, one tote out of the, I don't know, I want to say 15, but it's a hundred, hundreds of brands that do tote bags, right?
You always think, I want to have the largest tote bag, so people see your brand.
And that's a strategy.
That's something we've done in the past.
But people have so many totes, people that go to expo by now, in my opinion, like get more creative, think about it.
Who's your consumer?
Who is your audience?
And what's something that's relates to your brand that you think your consumer would keep in their house for a long period of time and be reminded of, oh, I need to go stock up on that brand?
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I think a lot of times we're thinking, you know, who is the consumer going to take this back to?
You can do something really big on a smaller budget if you plan it out in advance.
I think putting it out to your entire team instead of saying, okay, this is one person's job to think of the swag.
And crowdsourcing, we have a particularly gifted member of our team, Anouck's husband, Greg, who like is really, really good at coming up with really fun, zany ideas for swag.
And he also is like very adept at like navigating the corners of the internet and finds places to have them sourced in China and elsewhere.
So as long as we're giving enough lead time to have those shipped in, it's like made quite reasonably.
But, you know, what's gonna stand out?
What's gonna be different?
What is gonna make somebody from across the hall say, oh, I have to go get that XYZ from Belgian Boys.
Like I have to make a special trip to their booth for it.
And that's kind of the litmus test we put our swag to.
And think about it as a way of, if they get to the booth and we say, there is no more, what would make them actually disappointed that they didn't get?
And then you know you have something good.
We definitely had a few angry customers last year.
One or two just builds buzz for the next year.
You mentioned sort of, you know, crowdsourcing ideas from your whole team and something that you both have mentioned is that you crowdsource what your list of goals for the show is.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
You know, I think that when you're at a trade show, Expo West particularly, you get overwhelmed and you in the earlier years, I remember us asking like with Robin, we're like, okay, was this a, yeah, this was a great show, right?
Like, was it a good show?
Was it like, yeah, it feels like it was a good show.
We had a lot of people coming, lots of buyers.
And, but was it really a good show?
So what we've done last year, and I thought was super successful, and we'll do again this year, is actually sit down as a team, and say, what does success mean to you for Expo West, right?
Because success to Tracy is not success to me.
We have a different objective for Expo West, right?
Like if you're ahead of marketing, or if you're a VP of sales, or USC, or whatever, you have different wants of the show.
So for one, it may be, if you're focused on innovation, I wanna take the time to actually walk all the show and see every single boot at the show.
That may be on the top of your list, as this would mean successful.
Because if not, if you don't say it, you'll be like, oh my God, I was so crazy at the boot, I didn't even have a time to walk the show and see what else was there.
So if you say in advance to your team, success to me means walking the whole show, then the team can be mindful of that and say, you go do you now.
For marketing, maybe meeting other brands.
For social media, I wanna plan five giveaways with other brands.
I wanna meet investors.
Don't say I wanna meet investors.
Who do you wanna meet?
Write it down and get a strategy of how you're going to meet them.
Buyers, say which buyer you wanna meet.
At least write it down, because at the end of the show, you can say out of the five readers I wanted to see, you know what, I only saw one.
Wasn't really successful, right?
Up to my strategy of what I wanted to achieve at this show.
I think it's super, super beneficial.
At this point, Belgian Boys, I'm sure, certainly has a number of meetings set up, and I'm sure that you have sort of a direct line of communication to a lot of the buyers that you'd like to see.
But what's your advice for emerging brands who are trying to attract buyers to their booths?
Maybe they don't have a broker yet.
Maybe they don't have a direct line of communication.
What's your recommendation?
If they have that list of five buyers they want to get in touch with, how do you track them down if they don't stop at your booth?
Literally track them down.
Like being the eyes, watch the booth, like, see, I want to do, like don't be like spooky or something.
But I'll give an ad to our head of sales, Robin, who just, she works so creatively within her function.
And this is something where I think you start early.
If you know there are buyers who you don't have a direct contact with already, start early and get creative.
One of our favorite ever Robin stories is she was trying to get a buyer to call her.
So she purchased a phone and shipped it to the buyer with a note that said, call me on it.
Like, and it worked.
The buyer called her and you know, they established a relationship.
So plan it out ahead.
Know that this is your day where you're going to, it's like you have, pretend like you already have an in-person meeting.
You just have to like get the attention to make sure they show up to it and do whatever you need to do to make that happen.
Do so, do whatever you have to do, right?
Stand out with your boots, stand out with the way you sample, stand out with how you're dressed.
Don't, you know, you need to be like a show stopper.
People want to walk by your boot, you know, if they're having a conversation, like two people when they walk in the aisle, you want them to go, like turn their head and actually look at you.
So that's up to you to make sure that they turn their head and they look at your boot and they look at how you show up.
And how do your show goals for a show like Expo West vary from say, you know, a tabletop distributor show like a Cahey or UNFI shows where people are actually taking orders?
How do the goals differ between those two different kinds of shows?
I think Expo West is a show where you need to go with the understanding, in my opinion, that everyone is a consumer.
If you think about it, thousands of people are there.
They all love CPG and they all love the brands that are displayed there.
They're all potential consumers of your brand as well.
So go with that mindset with buyers.
I think it's more of where we found success.
I wanna say is buyer we saw one year of the big retailers, then they see you a second year, third year ago.
Your brand is still alive.
Okay, come, let's talk.
Let's have a conversation.
Let's have a meeting about bringing your brand in.
Don't go there and expect that you're gonna get CEOs and selling relationships immediately.
I do wanna ask you both.
We were talking about a few housekeeping tips and tricks that I thought were so fantastic.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that you really realize over the course of a few Expo West.
Talk to me about rugs and trash baskets, please.
It's like carpet, right?
You can order the carpet from Expo West, and have the same carpet, maybe in another color than everybody else, and you will pay a lot of money for that carpet, or you can just go to a retailer, Target, Walmart, whatever, buy carpet that stands out and put it in your boot.
It's gonna cost you the same, if not cheaper, but it's gonna look, oh, that's different.
They have bright pink carpet, right?
So that's one tip.
You also want the carpet, because you need to be comfortable.
You're gonna be standing all day, which leads me to shoes, comfy shoes, very, very comfy shoes, because you're gonna be standing or walking all day.
Trash cans, Tracy, you had a tip on that.
Yes, do not put a trash can for consumer use in your boots.
Have one in the back or tucked away for your employees, but there are trash cans that the show provides that consumers can easily find their way to.
I think you can rent them from the show.
It's costly, and then you also keep having to take out the garbage.
You do not need a consumer-facing trash can in your booth.
I see a question from Jonathan.
This is a great question.
With the number of skews that a brand like Belgian Boys has, how do you choose what to highlight?
So I think this is one that kind of differs as you move along in your brand journey.
When we started, it was all coming along.
It was all coming along because we needed people to understand who we were and what we had to offer and how we were positioning ourselves.
And as we've grown as a brand, we've grown our brand awareness, we've had the luxury of being able to now use our booth to really curate a story.
We follow trends, we can do these big bold things.
We're very, very focused with the message, but it's because as a brand, we're at a different stage.
If you're an emerging brand, you may still need to bring most of your skews, but I think Anouck, you had some good tips on what not to bring.
You know, I think it's more about what not to sample, right?
Like think about it when you go to a buyer's meeting and if you show, I don't know, five flavors of your product, you definitely already know the two or the three you want them to take because those are your best sellers, right?
I would say sample those because those would be the ones you would be happy to have on a PO versus the other two.
So you can show the five items, but maybe you decide to only sample the best sellers and put the other ones like, oh, if someone asks to try, you want to make sure that if they try one product again and you hand them in the aisle, they turn their head and they'll be like, oh my God, this is the best thing I've had in the last like of today at the show.
Don't give them something that is not your best product because that might ruin, that will most likely ruin your shot, in my opinion.
Anouck, you said something that I think makes so much sense.
Don't sample what you don't want to sell.
Yeah, it seems obvious, but I mean, I know I've sampled a lot of stuff early on that I was like, oh, why did they take that?
Well, because you sampled it, obviously, right?
They're all your babies.
You know, it's hard sometimes to pick your favorite child, but sometimes you have to do that, or the right child for the right moment.
I see a question from Jeff.
This is a great question in something, your innovation is something that we've been talking about throughout this entire call.
Are you ever concerned that someone's going to steal your innovation at a show like this?
You know, I think innovation, there's a lot of companies have secrecy around innovation, right?
The way I see it is, you have the best target audience at Expo West.
It's like the Super Bowl of specialty food, right?
You have the key decision makers, influencers, like industry leaders at that show.
You need to ask for their opinion because your product as it is right now, even if it's in innovation stage, it probably can be improved.
Ask for feedback, improve it yourself.
Don't be afraid of copycat because if you're afraid of copycat and you don't ask for advice, then you might launch a product that is not 10,000% just because you didn't ask, how do I make it even better?
I've got so much great feedback by showing stuff that was two, three years ahead of launching under the table to some buyers saying, what do you think of that?
Oh, I would make it bigger.
I would make it smaller.
Have you thought about putting it in a box versus a flow pack?
Ask, ask people that you trust for their opinion.
I think we have time for one last question from Nicole.
Do you use lead scanners at the show?
Is that part of your strategy?
And what does your follow up post show look like?
Yeah, we do use lead scanners.
And we've charged a couple of people usually with like, you know, we use it on our own phones.
So it's a little more DIY than if you get the scanners from the show.
But at the end, we take the big Excel download and we turn it into a Google Sheet and everybody goes in and assigns who they're gonna follow up with.
We kind of trickle off anybody who maybe wasn't a relevant lead at the moment.
And then we all have a really actionable to-do list after the show.
And sometimes you forget even that you met a person or that this person came through your booth.
And especially, you know, if anyone on this call is going for the first year, you'll see it's a mad house.
It gets really, really crazy.
So you may not have the time to have a conversation with everybody coming through.
So it's a really great tool to be able to say, let me just scan quickly before they walk out of the booth and then we'll follow up later on.
You had to sort of boil down your advice for brands exhibiting at Expo West.
What's your top two or three pieces of advice that folks should keep in mind for a great show?
That's a really good question.
I think have fun.
Honestly, it seems stupid, but you always go with the pressure of this and that.
But there's something about the effortless approach, right?
And you put so much effort into planning the show.
When you're actually there, be present in the moment so that you can actually see what's happening around you.
You can notice a buyer just there, or being at a CPG, like a mixer or a networking event.
Most of them are free.
Attendance, go there, and you never know who's next to you at the bar and just say, hey, how was your day, right?
And it might be the buyer that you wish you would meet.
So I would just say be present and see what's around.
Another piece of advice, I would say, actually, this is for everybody.
Bring mints, have mints at your booth.
Favor to you and favor to everybody around you because you're gonna have so much conversations.
Make it a pleasant one.
Like people eat all sort of things at that show.
You wanna have a conversation that's pleasant.
Mine would be if you are going as a team or as a group, go dress as a squad.
The more visible you are, the better.
And if people are turning their heads to see this group of four or five people walking through, you're a moving billboard.
Like don't forget that.
And I think it plays into what Anouck said.
Like you wanna be talking to as many people as you can because you never know what can happen from that.
It could be a partnership, it could be an investor, it could be a new retailer.
So whatever you need to do to bring visibility, that is one of our favorite things is figuring out the outfits.
We just had the outfit call earlier today.
Even if you're going just as one person, wear something wild so that people are not going to forget you.
Think about it, it's California, right?
It's not like a white shirt and suit.
People are chill, relaxed.
They wanna go and have a good time.
Last year, people were calling us the pink ladies.
Pink ladies, come here.
And we were like all walking there.
It was like super funny.
But yeah, dress to remember.
And speaking of team, you're there with all your team.
This is like team building.
People enjoy, these are memories you're gonna remember all the time.
Like building pallets, schlepping stuff in, schlepping stuff out without people seeing that you have the four wheeler.
All these things, these are like memories, so yeah.
Anouck Gotlib and Tracy Motz, thank you so much for joining us and sharing the trade secrets that have made you best in class exhibitors.
Thank you so much.
We appreciate it.
Thank you, Melissa.
Thanks for having us and see everyone at Expo.
We'll see you at Expo.
That concludes another episode of the Community Call podcast.
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