We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We had gone through 8 1/2 oils this week.) What’s amazing is that this amount of sales matches what we made ON THE BEST DAY at the Brimfield Antique Festival. This was a spot where we had to pay more than $300 per day to set up there, and we now sell the same amount on a daily basis in Springfield for $15.

If you’ve been reading his blog, you would have seen that I made some T-shirts about a year ago. They just had the Velma’s logo on the front and this website address on the back. I think I sold about 3 of ‘em and gave away the rest. I just sold all the silk screening supplies to someone on craigslist.org. I found a new T-shirt method and another idea I want to try.

First off, the silk screening method works great if you want to print on many things with few colors for the cheapest price. It doesn’t print details and subtle colors very well and it’s a major pain in the ass to clean up after you’ve done a run of shirts. There are other methods of printing on a shirt.

Heat press transfers and dye sublimation seem to be the way to go if you want to print a photo or colorful design on a shirt on a short production. Once you have the stuff to do this, you can bang out single shirts and change the design as you go along, or even try different designs each time.

I had originally wanted to do a goofy cartoon design for my first T-shirt, but never decided on what a cartoon Velma should look like. I was an art student back in high school and always loved MAD magazine and the style of those drawings. (I especially loved Basil Wolverton.) I also remember seeing these trading cards called Odd Rods, drawn by the artist BK Taylor. Odd Rods are these oversized, grotesque monsters driving automobiles. The cards and T-shirts of the same designs were kinda popular back in the 70’s. Since everyone is calling our product “kettle crack”, I want to do a design of an actual kettle crack addict eating the stuff while having the words KETTLE CRACK right on there, and maybe toss our name and website on there too.

I like the idea of having it in the style of the original Odd Rods style. Then I thought it would be really cool if I could get BK Taylor to do the drawing. I found his agent on line and shot out an email to her to see how much it would cost to commission BK Taylor to do it, figuring it would be too expensive to get the ORIGINAL guy to do this. She said that $750 will get me an electronic file of the final drawing. Apparently BK Taylor keeps the original drawing, I won’t own the copyright.

I dunno. $750 is kinda steep to shell out for an uncertain idea of mine. I still need to buy the heat press and printer to actually make the T-shirts, and I’ll only be making $7 - $8 per shirt. I need to move 90 shirts before I even start making a profit? Hoo boy…I dunno. I may take a crack at doing the design myself and see what’s left of my high school drawing skills.

Not too much to report, just that it’s been hot and sales have been steady.  We’re selling near record amounts of bags in Springfield constantly, so I hardly have time to sit down and have lunch.  This goes on for 6 hours straight.  At this point we physically can’t pop much more unless we get a third person to help.  I’m gonna start looking into making a motorized kettle cover which can stir the stuff while I bag.  I guess we’re now the victims of our success.  The days are starting to feel like a grind.  I barely have time to shoot any silly video.

I seem to be turning into the Internet kettle corn answer man.  Because we have such high rankings on Google, everyone finds us first.  A bunch of people who’ve started their own kettle corn biz have been asking me all sorts of questions on how to do it.  One guy in California got access to a large event of 23,000 people.  Apparently he buys a kettle from North Bend Originals and asks me how much supplies he would need to make 25,000 bags of kettle corn.  I tell him that 100 bags an hour is a full throttle, flat out amount of kettle corn that is almost humanly possible to make.  I also tell him that after 8 hours of this, you’d want to put a bullet in your head.

I then get an email from him saying that he NOW got the specifics of the event and he probably won’t be doing it. They want $400 per day AND 25% of the net.  (I was wondering if they at least paid for the anal lubricant.)  I explained the math to him and he agreed that it wasn’t worth doing it.  A typical farmers market only wants $15 out of you.  I’ve recently gotten offers from some “big” events in my area and I just laugh when I see the entry fees.

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.

I started getting some emails from a concession supply distributor a few weeks ago and the guy wanted me to buy some popcorn from him. He sold a variety of popcorn known as “mushroom”. It pops into little round balls and is mainly used in making caramel corn. Because the caramel is mixed into already popped popcorn and is stirred by putting it into a giant rotating machine, the kernels tend to take a beating and will break apart if it’s not tightly held together, as in a little ball of popcorn. Many other kettle corn makers use this variety. We here at Velma’s use the movie theatre style “butterfly” popcorn from ACT II. Two reasons; I can find it easily at SAM’s club and it’s supposed to taste better. The concession guy appears in front of my tent wielding a 50 lb. bag of Pop Weaver mushroom style popcorn. I’m very paranoid about changing anything in my recipe ’cause people go nuts over my kettle corn as it is. I buy and bag and figure “what the hell, let’s see how this crap stacks up.”

I popped up a few batches with the exact same proportions as a I usually use in my recipe. You’ll notice that the kernels look exactly the same before you pop them. No big surprise here. (Click on the pictures to get a larger image.)

Well the stuff looks interesting. There wasn’t as many corner bits flaking off as I was cooling and stirring it in the bin. Take a look at the sides of this website to compare what I now pop to this. Thing is, it didn’t pop to the same volume as my regular “butterfly” kettle corn. I would guess about 1 bag short than the usual load.

We started doing taste tests with a few of the customers. We called the Pop Weaver stuff “brand X”. Some of the comments I got back were my original butterfly style was more crunchy. A couple of people requested some of the mushroom style bags we made. I’ll be giving some of these new bags to some of my kettle corn connoisseur friends and see what they think. I’ll keep everyone posted.

I guess it was time for the obligatory newspaper photo. I’m not even sure what local rag this was in, but here it is. A couple of people have come up me while popping kettle corn and mentioned they saw it. I suppose this can only help the biz. It kills me that there will always be an error in whatever newspaper article I’m mentioned in. I even gave the guy our magnet which has our name clearly identified as WICKED delicious. Sigh.

I’m also a professional videographer when I’m not making this stuff, so I had a good repertoire going with the newspaper photographer. If you notice during a broadcasted baseball game, there is basically only one good spot to catch most of the action, it’s behind the pitcher zoomed way in so you can see the batter and catcher all in one shot. As with kettle corn, there is only one good spot to catch the “action”; in front of the kettle, opposite side of the popper.

So when this photographer arrived, he immediately got behind me and close to the kettle. I point out to him the universally accepted spot to take the photo; which is in front. He just kind of waves my comment off and continues to crouch behind me. At this point the load of kettle corn I was making goes off and starts to splatter hot oil and kernels in his direction. He makes a yelping sound and scampers off. I start doing Kevin Costner from the J.F.K. movie; “front..and to the side, front…and to the side.” I should mount a little plaque that says “picture spot” onto the side of the sifting bin.

It’s the third day of the season in Springfield and the sale are still holding up! Even though the weather was kinda iffy we still went through 7 1/2 corn oil jugs. This would’ve been a very fine day anytime last year, but it’s only the beginning of this season. As mentioned previously, we’re still missing a bunch of of the vegetable vendors and they’ll show up once something has had time to grow out of the ground. At this rate, we should get a record day sometime in July.

I still find it fascinating monitoring the drug habits of our patrons. (Oh, did I say DRUG habit? I meant kettle corn buying habits.) Above is a typical view of the farmers market this time of the year. It’s not exactly swarming with people.

Now here’s a view of our tent around 4:30 pm. This was our “big rush” around that time. You wouldn’t notice from just driving by, but it’s the steady stream of just one person buying a bag, then someone else appearing 3 minutes later wanting the same. You do this for 5 hours straight and that’s how we end up going through 7 jugs of oil. A small farmers market usually wants $20 a day for us to be there. Many craft festivals easily want $200 out of you before you sell one kernel. I guess the trick is to build up a following of loyal customers who want their fix. Apparently this is how real drug dealers get caught selling out of their homes. There’s never a crowd, but a steady stream of cars coming by all the time. At some point the neighbors notice what’s going on and call the cops. What’s nice about our biz is we sell our “drugs” to the cops.

Another thing that surprised me was the web stats on this website. You people have been visiting this stupid blog big time! As you’ll notice on the chart for April of this year, the blog page gets over 3,500 views, way more than the “buy kettle corn” or the main index page. My main purpose of this blog was to just generate crap about kettle corn so Google would rank our webpage higher in it’s rankings if you searched for “kettle corn”. I mean…c’mon, it’s about a guy in a tent hocking “drugs”.

The Framingham Farmers market will be starting back up in June, so I’ll be yammering on about that. I’ve got an idea to help market ourselves and hopefully we can bring those numbers up to what we’re doing in Springfield. Oh yea, and we’ve started to sell kettle corn online again. Within 24 hours of setting up the webpage, we had 2 orders. I think they were customers who had bought a bag online in the past. Let’s see how online sales pan out this year.