This weekend, we helped birth a business right in our very own living room.
A good friend of ours, Zac Caldwell, wants to share his quirky and amazing jams and jellies with all of you. So he’s launching a Louisville-based food products business, Caldwell’s Quirky Cookery, and using the power of the Internet to raise capital.
A couple of dozen people munched on Jalapeno Peach Jam and Triple Berry Bourbon Jelly as Zac made the pitch to help finance his dream through Kickstarter, the on-line crowd funding tool that’s financed everything from moon rockets to potato salad. He’s trying to raise $12,000 in the next 30 days to pay the start-up costs needed to cook up batches of his gourmet products at Chef Space, the new culinary incubator in Louisville’s West End.
Within an hour, people that Zac has known all his life and others that he has never met began pledging dollars for his dream. How can this happen? In the world of social media, all things are possible.
Zac, with the help of our tech-savvy son, Clay, created a short video that shares his passion and posted it on Facebook, Instagram and his own website, www.eatquirky.com. It was a smart move. Video and photos are as essential to social media as sugar and fruit are to jam making.
As he showed the shaky video to his assembled crowd, Zac told them, “I’d love to have your money, but I’d rather each of you give me 10 of your friends than 10 of your dollars.”
Zac is spreading jam messages (sorry, couldn’t help myself) with frequent posts and sticky hashtags like #eatquirky. Only time will tell whether social media will empower another entrepreneur to soon turn a good idea into good eats available on store shelves near you.
Join me in this social media experiment. Click here and pledge $10, $100 or more to help Zac share his tongue-tingling products with the masses. If we use our collective voice, we will prove that marketing and communications today is just as quirky, kicky and sticky as the stuff that Zac is cooking up.
Eat quirky, my friends.
Chad Carlton,
C2 President
