Sometimes the best business insights come from listening to your customers. When we discovered that pet stores were purchasing our crickets year-round (versus the seasonal bait market that only wanted one expensive-to-produce size), we knew we'd found our sweet spot.
This revelation led us to dive headfirst into the pet industry trade show circuit. Picture this: our team loading up the old white Dodge "cricket" van with a homemade booth, heading to Fort Worth for our first show.
After a successful debut, we brainstormed ways to stand out even more. Someone suggested chocolate-covered crickets as an attention grabber. Unconventional? Absolutely. Effective? You bet.
But here's where it got interesting. While the chocolate crickets drew crowds to our booth, we realized we needed a way to advertise our presence to the entire show floor. Enter our stroke of marketing genius: the "I Ate a Bug Club - Fluker Farms" button.
Suddenly, our booth visitors became walking billboards, proudly displaying their buttons after sampling our chocolate crickets. The result? Our booth was absolutely mobbed.
This success sparked a bigger idea: Why not turn this into a retail product for convenience stores?
The challenge? Finding a commercial kitchen willing to work with insects in 1980s America. My first two calls to Louisiana chocolatiers ended with the same response: "Do you know how much I spend keeping bugs OUT of my facility?!"
For my final attempt, I took a different approach. I secured an in-person meeting in New Orleans without revealing the full concept upfront. Armed with our legitimate pet product catalog and the Fluker's brand story, I built credibility first.
The strategy worked. After careful consideration, the chocolatier agreed to produce our product during their off-season from Easter candy production.
Sometimes persistence, creativity, and knowing how to tell your story makes all the difference.
The fame that followed? Well, that's a story for another post…
