Talking about handouts and Fanshoes.

Had a great week. We gave our first public speech to business students at Mercy HS and got great feedback! Considering we didn't know what to expect it went swimmingly. We were even asked to speak to student DECA leaders at a DECA event in early November.

Thank you Mary the business teacher and Courtney our student liaison for allowing us that opportunity. And thanks to all the students. (we're waiting to see the picture with the first class...so we can post it up!)

We have added enough stores to break the 70 store barrier and are planning to talk with distributors again soon. I have also began reaching out to the local mountains in the area. Bristol, Swaine, Hunt Hallow... etc. So hopefully in the coming winter you will be able to get that hydrating charge that you need while shredding the mountain after you did a double backflip from a helicoptor to land in epic white powdery back country. Ugh!

St John Fisher should be carrying Vital Energy very soon. We sampled our drink during lunch at the Cyber Cafe on campus, as did a few other companies. Students had to fill out comment cards so that the Fisher staff could see if they cared for our drink. Students overwhelmingly gave us positive reviews! Here is a pic from our setup. We had the video of our tangerine flavor being made playing and had our newspaper articles on our table.
Other big news is a local company has been talking with us and wants us to help out at a FIFA fashion show they have planned coming up next month. They design shoes with custom prints for the fans of different teams. The shoes are great and allow you to show your team pride from head to toe, literally. Might have to get some custom vital energy kicks to go with our swanky polos! Check them out FANSHOES.

Sidenote: If you are in a store and want vital energy to be carried there, ask someone about it or why they don't carry it. If enough people ask, stores start to listen!

Til then, drink it all in.
-J

Fall into winter

We lost our warehouse. Although it was not what we wanted, it is after all how business goes sometimes. Our warehouse guy received a large cash investment to buy new equipment for his water bottling company, so our storage is getting overhauled into a water processing facility. On that note though, we wish him continued success.

To compensate, Mike Scottie and I spent a lovely Saturday renting a truck, transporting the final pallets to our homes and breaking them down in fashion. Every nook and cranny is filled with our beverage now to our parents dismay. That is why we love them after all! Side note: where did the word cranny come from? Or nook for that matter? Anyway...

The warehousing issue is something we have come to expect with starting up a company. You can't predict much, everything is open to interpretation and there is always wiggle room. No matter how much you plan something it can always backfire and misstep along the way so you just have to be flexible and want it to work.

We have officially crossed the 60 store mark and are looking at ordering some counter top fridges. The reason for the fridges is to help us bypass other companies contracts and create our own cooler space. A few stores have stated specifically that they would take us on if we provided the coolers. As it just so happens, we met a cooler guy through a random encounter at a Starbucks after a meeting. Booya networking!

Some last minute notes.

-We are thinking about changing the name of our product for when we launch the new label. This will help focus our product and the message we are sending to our audience.

-I am trying to set up a meeting with an editor to try and write a monthly column on starting and running a business.

-We are giving talks to a few different high schools in the area in the next few weeks and are having to prepare our first public speech!

Drink it all in,

-J

BTW: nook is of 14th century Scottish origin and is an interior angle formed by 2 walls. cranny is 15th century English/French origin and is a small break or slit; crevice

It's been 10 days!

It's been 10 days since we last blogged. Things have been moving pretty fast over here. Jake and I are both still taking care of distribution, but he's now taking care of most of our office duties (appointments and emails), while I'm devoting more of my time to sales.

This week we were interviewed for the Brighton Pittsford Post, and I took part in the August 15th edition of the Insider magazine's 20 questions section. We took the Post picture at Jake's house, and the magazine picture was taken in my office.

We've also been discussing our next production run. One obvious change that will be made is the introduction of our third flavor, Raspberry Apple, which I am really excited about! Another alteration we will be making is a label redesign. Since we are a pure start-up company, we designed our label ourselves...and there are a few things we'd like to improve!

When we designed the label, we wanted to emphasize that we are an energy drink with as much energy and caffeine as those sugary caffeinated energy drinks, so we listed 150mg of caffeine on the label thinking people would understand that this is an energy drink. Unfortunately we could have written this in German because many consumers have no idea what that means in terms of energy! (it's equivalent to a 16oz MONSTER, two 8oz red bulls, or 2 cups of coffee). At the moment we are relying on our point of sale door stickers and word of mouth marketing to get this message relayed to customers. Our next label design will get this message across more efficiently.

Here is a sample of a window sign we have used. We used to have crushed energy drinks at the bottom, but we've come to realize that negative advertising is probably not the best way to go. Sometimes we do put an energy drink comparison on our signs so people can see that we have some serious energy!
Currently we are discussing the changes we will make to the label. It's very likely it will be a much more aggressive label that emphasizes just how much energy Vital Energy provides.

If you have comments you'd like us to consider for our new design, leave us some feedback! We'd love to hear from youuu!

Thanks and drink on
-mike

PS. I don't like to make these blogs too long, so tomorrow I'll blog about our warehousing dilemma and how we solved it! We'd like to blog about most issues that arise so that in the future when Vital Energy is kicking butt people can look back and see how we started :)

Promoting with the bus

It's been hectic over here. We've received lots of phone calls from people who saw our article and news interview last week. Some stores called and wanted our product, some people wanted to congratulate us, and lots of people wanted to sell us stuff!

Unfortunately we aren't looking to purchase other peoples products...sorry! We have a long way to go to make this successful, but we appreciate the support from everyone :)

On Saturday we promoted at an international Ultimate Frisbee tournament at Ellison Park and went to the Sutherland Homecoming football game against Rush Henrietta. We borrowed Scottie's bang bus and loaded it up with hundreds of bottles of Vital Energy.

The Frisbee tournament was awesome. I made an announcement on a loud speaker to all the teams and told them who we were and that we had free drinks for them to try out. We handed out cold drinks to each of the 12 teams and we hope it helped them compete!

At the Sutherland football game we each loaded up backpacks full of cold beverages and handed them out to all the students we could find. Some people refused it because they didn't know it was free. Eventually people realized what we were doing and started yelling to us to throw them a free drink up in the stands!

Here are some pictures from our sample fest at the High School football game. I'm going to put up a blog tomorrow or Saturday and let you all know how our sales are going! We've also had some cool meetings I'll tell you about later.

Check out our new poster (we've placed this at most stores we are selling in)
-Mike