How Diet Coke and American Express Helped A Mom Bring Her Product To Market

People ask me all the time about how did a small town Mom with no apparel experience manage to get her little t-shirt line Bee-Tees® into a national retailer like Cracker Barrel Old Country Store?

It was a long and winding road as you can imagine. But there was one significant thing that happened involving my caffeinated beverage of choice, Diet Coke, and the subsequent usage of American Express that left a permanent impression and was instrumental in building my relationship with the buyers at the national restaurant and gift giant.

In July 2009 I was attending the Atlanta Gift Mart, known as AmericasMart, as an exhibiting vendor. For those of you not familiar with the Mart, there are three buildings, 15 floors each packed with every kind of gift item, apparel item, home décor item and whole bunch of other items that you couldn’t even dream of. I mean thousands of acres of merchandise for store owners and buyers to choose from. There are hundreds of thousands of people who come to the “Market” from all over the world to buy merchandise for their stores. These are Mom and Pops all the way to large retail chains. The place is simply overwhelming!

But this is the place that I knew I could go to get Bee-Tees® noticed by buyers. I had no idea how to put together a booth (as I had never done anything like this before) but I did the best I could with my knowledge of graphics and trying to tell my story.

The show opened on Friday at 9 am. It lasts until 6. Anyone who has ever worked a trade show booth knows how exhausting this can be. I have the utmost respect for those of you who do this for a living! I don’t do standing or concrete very well. But I had a good day that day; I opened several new accounts and had a blast telling the Bee-Tees® story. And little did I know it would turn out to be great practice for what the next day would bring.

Let me preface that Saturday by telling you that I had received a text on Friday from a licensee that we had began to work with a few months prior. I had sought out this licensee as they had a relationship with Cracker Barrel and I hoped they could have an opportunity to pitch Bee-Tees® to them. I knew that their salesmen was going to Cracker Barrel sometime soon and they would let me know of any interest that the buyers had in my little t-shirt line. The text I received on Friday was that Cracker Barrel was not interested in Bee-Tees! LI was devastated! This was the account that, quite frankly, I felt was a ringer for our message. I mean it’s wholesome, simple and all-American! I couldn’t believe that they turned it down!! But I was there, on the largest stage in the apparel industry and was going to give it my best shot.

On Saturday I had a great morning of sales and my sister had come down to Atlanta to help me out. She is a librarian by trade, so talking to folks is not her favorite thing but I really think she secretly enjoyed it! She allowed me to take short potty breaks and go for quick bite of lunch. So I hurried off to grab a sandwich and gather my thoughts. I came to the food court in building 3, it was nuts! People were everywhere! And I stood in line for about 20 minutes to grab a burrito. I searched for a place to sit and relax for just 10 or 15 minutes. This would be a welcome vacation from standing on concrete for hours on end! I spotted several tables where there was only one person eating. So I asked if I could join one of them at the table. She politely agreed and we struck up a conversation. You know “How are you?”, “Are you having a good show?”, that sort of thing. I then asked where she was from. She spoke with a beautiful accent which I thought was British, but come to find out she was from South Africa and is in the US working for a company called Cracker Barrel Old Country Store! I could not believe my ears! Was I on Candid Camera? I thought, “You must be kidding me?” Hundreds of thousands of people here and I sit down at lunch with this lovely woman who works for my target retailer. God was smiling on me that day!

The question is what would I do with this opportunity that God and fate and had handed me on a silver platter? I’ll tell you what I did…I did what no one would ever do except me… I spilled my Diet Coke all over her gorgeous WHITE linen pantsuit! Yep! I did it!

Without having to relive every embarrassing moment of the interaction, let’s just suffice it say that I left an impression on this sweet woman!

The good news is that the incident didn’t happen until after I had a chance to pitch her on Bee-Tees® (which I had down perfectly from all the practice) and convince her to come to my booth.

Even while trying to wipe Diet Coke from her fancy shoes she couldn’t contain her enthusiasm for Bee-Tees®! I could see it all over her face.

While trying to clean herself she asked me to send her some samples. The rest of the show was a blur as I considered what to send and how many and anything else that could make an impression.

I was so excited and embarrassed that I could not even sleep that night! My brain was a flurry trying to figure out how to capitalize on the most fortunate but embarrassing thing that had every happened to me!

When I returned home I gathered my samples and marketing materials along with a very apologetic letter and an American Express gift card specifically for her dry cleaning bill. I sent this off to Nashville thinking I would never hear from this wonderful lady again.

But to my surprise, she called me immediately when she received the package and thanked me for thinking of her enough to have her suit cleaned! The rest of what happened to Bee-Tees® from this experience will be revealed in future posts. But suffice it say to that the worst thing that you can think of happening might actually be the best thing that could ever happen.

The key is you have to be prepared when things don’t go as you plan, which is of course what happens most of the time!

Gifts and Decorative Accessories article about my chance meeting with Cracker Barrel