It feels like a return to our roots when we pack up the car to travel to a trade show with CowPots. My first job out of college (2006) included loading up the family mini van with samples of CowPots and cases of our retail packed products and driving around the tri-state area (NY, MA, CT) stopping at hardware stores and garden centers to make cold sales calls. There were some unique interactions as I introduced business owners to biodegradable pots made from poo. You can imagine the giggles and poo puns that resulted from my sales pitch. I was not fond of being a traveling sales woman though and decided to pivot our marketing tactics. Over the past 18 years we have made quite a few treks off the farm to attend industry trade shows. Here’s a taste of the shows we’ve attended, as well as an evolution of our trade show display!
As you might imagine, our marketing budget as a start up company was modest. This is the earliest photographic evidence I have of our first tradeshow display. The tabletop display was brown velcro and weighed a ton. It was a hand-me-down. Each of the images and articles plastered across the board were laminated with a sticky velcro tap applied to the back. The original CowPots logo was designed by Aunt Gloria, intended to feature the cow (spots), recycling logo and flowers growing. Obviously we embraced the cow spots and really stood out with this table covering! Even with a hokey display, putting ourselves at industry events to interact and engage with growers and retailers has been critical to the growth of our business. These early shows were usually in the Northeast, within a 3 hour drive of our farm.
We have always known that the cow imagery had to be the main feature. Afterall, this is what makes us stand out, especially at tradeshows filled with plants and greenhouses! Our original corrugated boxes for shipping our retail packed CowPots white with printed black cow spots. We learned after a few years that white boxes don’t fare well in ground shipping. Eventually we transitioned to plain jane brown boxes…but those white boxes were sharp!
In 2013 we attended Ohio Floriculture Association OFA’s tradeshow, now known as Cultivate. We filled a 15 passenger van with every style of CowPot, tables, shelves, banners, a rug and so many plants! We commenced the 12 hour drive at 3 am and have since made the decision to ship our trade show booth supplies in advance and fly when the trip is more than 8 hours away. We also pack a lot less live plants, and focus our display on the pots!
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In 2016 we traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the True Value Fall Reunion. The booths were more expensive than your typical grower/horticulture tradeshow so we had a 1/2 booth, which meant we shared the space with another vendor, a mosquito repellent company. It seemed fitting for bug repellent and cow manure to be together.
Over the years we’ve found unique and creative ways to attract eyes and attention to our booth. The inflatable cows with the bright pink udder and horns has become a default feature of our booth, we won’t go to a tradeshow without at least 3-4 inflatable cows. The tricky part is keeping them safe in our booth as they’re a popular item that people eagerly want to take home with them. And the real bait – cheddar cheese snacks! It’s the perfect way to lure prospects into our booth. We get to show off the world’s best cheddar from the Cabot Cooperative and then we get to talk about what we do with the other stuff that our cows provide us on a daily basis!
We have participated in 2 international tradeshows – IPM Essen in Germany in 2011 and the Garden Writer’s Association in Quebec, Canada. No matter the distance we travel, people are always intrigued and delighted by the farmer ingenuity we have applied to handling our dairy farm’s byproduct. In fact, attending the tradeshow in Germany resulted in gaining a customer from New York! Sometimes you have to go across the ocean to meet your neighbor 🙂
In a lot of ways we have simplified our booth. We no longer travel with hundreds of pots and plants. We’ve also found the tradeshows that are the best match for our offerings, and as a result we usually only attend 3 tradeshows a year.
And just like our humble beginnings, it’s usually a family affair. While it’s often a father and daughter duo, Matt and Amanda Freund, the other members of our farm family have been persuaded to come along to help wo-man the booth! Mom and sisters have been assets for both the heavy lifting and talking crap! They like joining us at MANTS in Baltimore, MD because it’s a slow time on the farm and it’s usually a few degrees warmer there in January.
The more recent creative addition to our booth display is embracing the fun poo-centric t-shirts. Matthew gets so many compliments on his Manure Occureth t-shirt that it has become required packing for trade shows.
