AgriMissouri Showcase:. The really big power shoppers finished up their shopping last weekend but most of us haven't come anywhere close to finishing and, let's face it, a lot of us have just barely even started thinking about what we might want to buy. But if you're selling stuff for Christmas, not buying it, you've got to start a lot sooner than November. This week we talk to two Missourians who are selling this time of year instead of buying. First up is Eva Hensley with Addie Jane & Originals of Hallsville. She says it’s a lot more work than you'd expect.
Eva Hensley:. Well, believe it or not we've actually started marketing Christmas back in July to our corporate customers. Many corporations we find set their holiday budgets at the first of the year, and by July they already want to be thinking about what they're going to be doing for the holidays and try to really have it all wrapped up before even Labor Day, so we actually started with our previous customers in July and now, this time of year what we're doing is ordering the merchandise and also reaching out to new customers. Really we start that from around Labor Day and we'll do it all the way up until Christmas to try to help people establish what type of gift giving that they want to do for the holidays. What we find is that corporations a lot of times they want things that are really accessible that they can just open. If it goes into an office environment, that maybe it’s popcorn, nuts, something that could be shared within an office, whereas we find if it goes to an individual, a lot of times they may get into more pancake mixes or a country ham or something like that that could be shared at home with a family. We try to be prepared as much as we possibly can, so we can let our Made in Missouri manufacturers have them know, because many of them are small businesses, you know, they don't have huge manufacturing plants and production gets pretty crazy sometimes this time of year, because sometimes you might start out and you just need 130 jars of nuts per se and then they decide they want to increase it so you just hope that a lot of communication with your Missouri producers to make sure that you can get the product. That's always very stressful for us this time of year. We always just make sure that we follow-up not only with the manufacturer but also with our customer to make sure that they are satisfied for example, last year we worked in conjunction with Grand Valley Farms and we produced about 150 gift baskets that was just full of Missouri pecans in different varieties of it, and of course Grant Valley Farms was thrilled to get the order and we were too, but we did get some concern with production and just the coordination of it. We have local delivery people that work with us that we do for Boone County and a lot of times people are really surprised by this that we use the United States Postal Service and we ship Priority Mail, you know, a lot of times people go oh, why don't you use UPS or FedEx? Those are wonderful shippers too, but we find with the post office, a lot of people do not realize it, they will actually send a mail truck here and pick up all of our boxes and they provide us with free packing tape and free boxes which helps us because we don't have to pass that box cost on to our customer, and if you start pricing boxes, I mean you're looking at a savings at about $1.30 a box, and what we try to do, too, is coordinate community efforts for example, we don't buy packing materials you know, like from a box supplier or something, we actually work in conjunction with the Randolph County Sheltered Workshops and they have the participants that go to the sheltered workshop, they do recycling and they'll shred papers for offices and we can get all of our packing material for the whole season for less than 20 dollars. It’s a great deal for them and it’s also a great deal for us, too. We have been in business for five years, but we've actually just had a storefront location for 3 and a half years. Normally, during the holiday season we will do anywhere from 800 to 1500 gift baskets. It is so much fun to work with consumers and people just don't really realize you know, a lot of times people don't think about how fun a gift basket can be and they love the products and they are like, this is made in Missouri? We hear that a lot! You know, everything from Fitz's Root Beer to Bankhead Chocolates to wood-smoked meats and different things. A lot of times until they get that Missouri Made basket, people just do not realize what great products our state has to offer. One thing I find about gift baskets, people really want those customized. So a lot of times instead of going over the Internet, deciding what they want, they like to call us and talk to us, you know, a lot of times people send us Emails more so from our web site and then another venture that we've done is called 360Columbia.com which is also a web-based site and we are on that, and we get a lot of Emails through that because, again, we just find that people like to customize their own gift baskets. Of if you don't know what to buy, get that Missouri gift basket because we've tried to expand to a not just do food products, we carry in our store, Missouri wide open baskets made from the Uhman // Basket Company down in Dora, Missouri and we try to do a lot of things Missouri that's not just food related, and one of the things that we do, too, is if a company has logo items whether it’s a mug or any other type of promotional materials they can give that to us and we insert it in the basket for them for free and people love that personalization that we do.
Julie Harker:. How important is the holiday season to your business?
Eva Hensley:. Oh, it’s probably 60% of our business that fourth quarter, it’s very very important.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. You can find Eva's business online at AddieJane.com that’s ADDIEJANE.com.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. Those gift baskets full of smoked meat are a holiday tradition for a lot of us and someone's got to make it and sell it. Mike Sloan is one of those people. He's president of Swiss Meat and Sausage Company near Hermann. He says they've been gearing up for the holidays since September.
Mike Sloan:. We get a large September rush and October rush with walk-in customers into our retails store where we feature many varieties of state and national champion smoked meats and we get through that rush, September and October and then the next rush of course is deer season and we kind of work our way through deer season and then it’s time for the mail order season. We mail out about 18,000 or 19,000 mail order catalogs across the United States and so the web site and the mail order business is just starting to kick in and every day it’s more and more orders. Up until Christmas when it’s actually starts to die a little bit and then we get a few more mail orders going in to New Year's and then it dies again until it gets to the next holidays. As far as marketing, we have to just keep our name out in front of the people and we do that through our repeat customers and we also had a chance to be on a food network a few months ago called Road Tasted nationwide publicity and we had, that was just phenomenal growth with our mail order. We had probably overnight, about 15,000 hits on our web site and you know, we fulfilled those orders and climbed ourselves out of that. It was with Road Tasted with Jamie and Bobby Deen, son's of Paula Deen, they came in, they made sausage with us, and then when they left they said they would be ready because you'll get very busy, and we said, OK. Because we're always very busy, we just didn't think nothing much was going to happen and then overnight when we had those 15,000 requests, it just blew us away, so we're just building on that and trying to keep our name out front. Using that momentum and keeping that going with the mail order and also the walk-ins it’s just been, and everybody likes to get good quality local farm-raised, smoked, hickory-smoked, sugar-cured hams, bacons and sausages and summer sausages, it’s just a peak season and even with September and October so many people are out traveling, the end of the year travelers, tourists, we make about 44 different varieties of bratwurst and smoked sausages, so that's real appealing to somebody who wants something from the country and not one of the box stores. We market our services too, not only on products but then we market our services, even the custom butchering and processing in deer season and then catering and private labeling. There's companies out there in the world who might like our product but they don't want our name on it, and we say that's fine, we'll put your name on it and give them the glory of selling it and we do quite a bit of that for farmers or ranchers who raise their own livestock but don't have a processing facility or don't have the recipes and they need a federal USDA or state-inspected processor to do that so we welcome that kind of business. When the Road Tasted show aired, the first time, about a year ago we hired five or six more employees and we've been able to keep those five or six employees on staff throughout the year because of just the momentum of repeat sales, 3-peat,4-peat, 5-peat repeat sales that we've come across with all this publicity with the marketing from the Food Channel. We always ship out on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We don't ship out on Thursdays and Fridays because we don't want that refrigerated product to sit somewhere on a truck in a warehouse, so Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are very busy with shipping, so when you're only shipping 3 days a week between now and Christmas there's not really that many days and some of the things that can go wrong is if you're not aware of a catastrophe or something going on in California such as the fires that they had, we had several orders that were to ship to the San Diego area and after they were shipped, they of course could not get to the area of where the house was because of the fires so you know, you run into situations like that where you just take that as a loss and that's a hit and you have to replace the product, so we're always looking to watch what's going on. The snow storms, the avalanches, the fires off in another part of the country that affects what you're doing here in Central Missouri. Last year when the snows hit in Colorado we had several packages that were not able to get to their destinations. The good thing about that snow, it was always cold, so the perishables stayed good, but you just had some unhappy customers that are upset because they didn't get their package on time especially if it was for a holiday gift, but most of them understand that those are things, acts of God and you really don't have too much control over those.
Julie Harker:. How important are the holidays to your business?
Mike Sloan:. Holidays are really important because that's when everybody is looking for specialty foods. They want something that is more of a handmade homemade type. They want something special for the families. They like to know where is comes from, how it was prepared, and they have a little more trust in something that it was prepared locally as opposed to something out of state or across country, or out of the country. We employ about 30 people, and of those 30 people, about half are family members and my dad started the business in 1969 and he's still here. He's retired but he just comes in when needed or usually on payday whichever comes first, so you know, my wife and my sisters. Two of my four sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-laws and about 15, 16 other employees.
Julie Harker:. With all this hard work during the holidays and I'm thinking some stress goes with it, do you guys still manage to get into the holiday spirit?
Mike Sloan:. Oh, you know, we do I think, but it just comes by so quickly and so fast, you know, it goes by 90 miles per hour and you just kind of go with it, it just comes and goes really really quick and first thing you know it’s January first and the year is over and you start all over again.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. You can check out Swiss Meats at their web site, SwissMeats.com. that's going to do it for this week's AgriMissouri Showcase. Thanks to Julie Harker for talking to Eva Hensley and Mike Sloan and thanks to Eva and Mike for talking to us. Check back within the week for another show with a Christmas theme. For now for AgriMissouri Showcase, I'm David Brazeal.
Sarah Gehring is our blogger. She's the Member Service Coordinator for the 
Most people don't start shopping for Christmas until Thanksgiving has come and gone. But if you're on the selling end of the transaction, Christmas preparations start a lot sooner than that. This week, Julie Harker talked to two people -- Eva Hensley of 
