19Nov
Rally Beans Coffee Bar
Rally Beans Coffee Bar open for business!
Okay, not really. At least, not in a permanent location.
As I was cleaning up some files on my laptop today, it occurred to me that I never blogged about this trade show booth. I was so thrilled with how it came together, and the results it yielded, but we were in the middle of the Bison Beans launch, and it got lost in the shuffle.
So let me tell you about it now. When we signed up for the 2015 Minnesota Educator Academy at the River Centre in St. Paul, we did not have a trade show booth. Of any sort. But we had a couple of months to come up with something.
As we worked through it, we decided we wanted to set up our booth to look like a warm, inviting coffee shop and call it Rally Beans Coffee Bar. But as we researched, we found this was going to present a few challenges – food safety licenses, water and power supplies, not to mention the River Centre policy allowing exhibitors to serve only small, sealed samples. Me, the rule-following accountant, wanted to give up at that point.
But anyone who knows Jaye knows that she lets almost nothing get in her way. She set about making phone calls and wearing people down. And once she got through all the red tape, she set about designing our booth, learning to run that commercial brewer and building a pallet bar.
And in the end, I was so, so thankful for her positive, can-do attitude and creative abilities. The Rally Beans Coffee Bar was the coolest thing in that exhibit hall, hands down. By the end of the day, we had served more than 300 samples. That means we talked to 300 or more people, and got our name out there in a big way. We didn’t have more than 5 minutes at a time to ourselves – and there were times the line was 5 & 6 people deep to get in to our coffee bar. I don’t think Jaye realizes what an accomplishment that truly is!
Kudos to Miss Jaye on her huge success at her first ever trade show!