We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We went 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 online 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.

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.

So I’m banging out the online orders, entering them into my database when I notice a person with @fritolay.com in their email address. I google their shipping address: 7701 Legacy Drive, Plano, TX. It’s the headquarters of Fritolay! This is cool…I’m sending 8 bags of Velma’s Wicked Delicious Kettle Corn to someone at Fritolay! Here’s what I wrote in my email:

Ya know, if you guys could figure out how to make this stuff for real on an industrial scale, you’d make a killing. I certainly got some ideas.

I’m planning on making a silly flash movie where I bash all the other “major” versions of kettle corn. (Popcorn Indiana, etc.) Nobody knows how to do it right. They think if you air-pop come popcorn and squirt some flavoring on it and call it “kettle corn”, no one will notice.

Getting no reply, I sent a follow up email:

OK, popped up a batch yesterday and will be shipping your order out today. (August 29th)

Noticing that it’s going to the corporate headquarters of Fritolay…I can only imagine…

..someone at their desk going, “GOD, if they make me eat another bag of Doritos I’m gonna quit!”

..after much web surfing..

“oh, what’s this?”

Thanks for the order!
Eric

(I would love to know if my kettle corn magnet is up someplace in Fritolay.)

I basically got this for a reply:

Eric,
Thank you so very much for the update. I appreciate your prompt response to my purchase and really enjoy your great humor!!

Hmmm…wadda ya think? We’re going to be seeing giant bags of Fritolay kettle corn in our supermarkets soon? I’m certainly not big enough to be bought out by these guys. Hell, I’ve put the recipe up on this website in a big, stupid flash movie. Oh well, I guess this will have to be my only brush with greatness. Back to the tent.

So we gotta have t-shirts, right? Everybody wants a t-shirt, right? OK, I guess we’ll see.

Years ago, when I was playing in an obnoxious rock band, I had created a cute logo for our band name: Smoking Cow. It was a cartoon of a cow smoking (go figure). We had printed up a couple dozen t-shirts and sold them all. It seemed more people enjoyed our cute t-shirts more than our loud music.

When the time came to create a logo for Velma’s Wicked Delicious Kettle Corn, I wanted to work in a funny cartoon of something, just so it would look good on a t-shirt. My early prototypes can be seen here, here and here. I liked the concept of a Velma as a witch (kettle/witch), but I didn’t want people to think it was a Halloween only treat. I was never was totally happy with what I came up with, so I’ve dumped it for now.
In my mind, I’ll be selling a million of these things. Why pay $300 to have a bunch of shirts made when for the same amount, I can buy everything I need to MAKE the damn things myself. (I will be making hundreds of these things, right?) Bought a silk screening starter kit from silkscreeningsupplies.com.

The website LOOKS professional and their videos were helpful, but it took ‘em ONE SOLID MONTH to get me everything after a bunch of emails and phone calls. SIGH Went with the one color press since I was just going to do the logo (red) on a yellow shirt. Normally you can spend a pile of more money doing multiple colors, but since I don’t have a cute Velma character to worry about, one color outta do it.

Bought a bunch of blank t-shirts from a Michaels art supply store. Banged out a logo on an acetate, burned the screens and printed up a couple dozen. They give you a nice ‘n detailed DVD that shows you all the steps, so it wasn’t too much of a biggie to pound these things out. The only wrinkle I discovered was that the inks in t-shirt silk screening don’t just air dry, you’ve got to heat cure the ink to about 350 degrees or else it’ll come apart in the wash. You get a cheapy Wagner paint remover heat gun with the kit, but it’s a pain in the ass to wave it over each shirt for about a minute to do its thing. I’ve got a two sided shirt (logo on the front, web address on the back), so multiply the drying time by two. We ended up tossing everything into our kitchen oven for a minute to finish off the curing. You’ve got to cough up another 300 bucks for the flash dryer if you want to bang these things out in any reasonable time. (I’ll have to get one of them too ‘cause these babies are gonna sell like…kettle corn.)

I eagerly hung them up for sale in our tent and waited for the rush. They’ve been on sale at our 2 farmers market locations all this week.

Total t-shirt sales so far: 0

Maybe they’ll sell better online. Steve and his kids certainly loved ‘em. Gee…maybe I do need a cute cartoon character. Everybody still loves getting the stupid refrigerator magnets. I’ll have to re-order some of them soon. Oh well.

Farmers market updates: They both hit a record number of sales this week! Framingham, which only has 4 other tents, has started to approach what we do in Springfield. Many people have told us that their friend insisted they come down and try it. Mostly repeat customers too.

Hey! I guess S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) works! We finally worked our way up to the #2 spot on Google for the key word “kettle corn”. Now we just have to push past wikipedia. So what’s the big deal you ask? Plenty.

I got the big idea to start selling kettle corn online about a year ago. The easy way is to just list an item on ebay and rake in the money. (How many people buy stuff on ebay? Millions. We’re gonna be rich-SOMEBODY wants kettle corn out there..right? Wrong. Hardly anyone bothered to look at the listing. The posting fees were also kinda steep just for a $4 item.

I noticed that thousands of people a month were searching on Google for kettle corn. How do I know this? Certain websites like Seobook will tell you how often a search term or keyword is entered in Google. As an example: the keyword “kettle corn” normally gets 5,280 searches a month. That’s cool. Not as much as say…the keywords “online gambling”, but an OK amount.

You’ve probably noticed that it’s tough to get a high listing on Google. Sure, if you know exactly WHO you want, their web page will appear on top of your search, but if you’re not sure of WHAT you want for something like kettle corn, there are many people wanting to sell you it on the web. Right now it says that there are 1,240,000 web pages with the words “kettle corn” on them. Since most people don’t bother to click beyond the first few links, you must get “up there” to be noticed.

How do you get a good listing on Google? Two ways: pay for a good spot (i.e. the Sponsored links) or have a popular website. Certain S.E.O. Websites will tell you what the going rate is to have the top spot on Google for you keyword. I know that North Bend Originals (the same kettle I have) is paying over $2 A CLICK to be listed as the top one. There is now way I’m going to pay $2 a click to sell a $4 bag of kettle corn.

What makes a website seem popular to Google? Links! If other people are linking to your website, Google thinks that you must be important. Especially if they are putting your keyword in their link back to you. This is when I started giving out free sample bags of kettle corn to anyone who would give me a link. I’ve now sent out almost 300 sample bags of kettle corn for the same amount of links. The best spot on a Google search page is not the area where the paid spots are but the top of the free Google suggestions. We’re right now at the second best spot AND we are above all the other vendors! Woo hoo!

At this point online sales is OK. I’d say we do about 12-16 bags a week. (3-4 orders) I’ve noticed certain people across America are REALLY into kettle corn and have started to re-order on an almost weekly basis. I figure once I’ve attracted the attention of enough of them, I’ll be all set!