Back in the nineties, Mom started marketing our farm’s meats with a yellow annual newsletter.  While she did that, we tried to learn how we could do it better.  We attended farm marketing conferences where we learned about packaging, branding and polish. 

So we tried making nice labels, developing better packaging.  We tried coming up with letterhead.  We tried wearing matching shirts and making sure they were clean on the same day that customers came to the farm for chicken pick-ups.  It’s harder than you think…getting everyone to have the same shirt clean on the same day!  Mom used to march around at the close of sale days with her hands held out, ordering us all to strip off our shirts so that they could be laundered and stored until the next time.  She always tried to get Dad’s off of him before he escaped to the barn and crapped it up.  She wasn’t very successful.

But we kept sending out the yellow newsletter.  We weren’t sure the matching shirts made much of an impression.  But the yellow newsletter worked.

Slowly, everything moved on-line.

I built the farm’s first website.

Then another website.

Then another website.

We stopped sending out the yellow newsletter and urged folks to place their orders online.  I told mom to declutter and throw out her old US postal mailing addresses.  They were a thing of the past. 

By then marketing the farm was all about social media:  developing an aesthetic, upping our photography, coming up with provocative things to say.  

We spent hours and hours working on that.  It was hard coming up with something quippy and provocative to say on a daily basis, paired with some kind of enticing graphic that captured the viewer’s attention.  It interrupted work in the cafe kitchen, it interrupted our family dinners, it interrupted our farm work.

And then we learned that we weren’t just expected to come up with something quippy and provocative to say…we were supposed to stare glassy-eyed at our social media feed and look at everything that everyone else said, and comment and “like” and “share” and “follow.”  That, in turn, was supposed to broaden our audience.

All this to sell some meat.

That annual yellow newsletter was suddenly looking pretty darn good.

And so, two years ago, we brought it back as a way to tell people about our CSA shares.

Most folks still ordered online, but a few of our long-time customers enjoyed the nostalgic feel of it, and chose to send it back to us in a hand-addressed envelope, with their deposits paid with a quaint old-fashioned check.  

And just like Mom used to do, I’d open the envelopes, read the forms, and enter the information into a spreadsheet.  Then I’d put the order form into a file in case any questions came up.

And I noticed that we didn’t lose as many orders as I did when they came in over the computer.  I made fewer recording errors.  And we didn’t pay as much in credit card fees.  I was the generation responsible for bringing my family’s business into the digital era…but I found that I truly enjoyed the physical pleasures of pens, ink, paper, and….of course… getting checks in the mail! 

Last year, we took the plunge to abandon social media, and I pleaded with mom to dig through her desk to find any old mailing addresses that might still be buried  there.* I sent emails to customers begging for mailing addresses, and I re-built the old mailing list.  We sent out the yellow newsletter to everyone we could.

And the response for ordering CSA shares  exceeded every digital slick trick I’d ever tried.  It turns out LOTS of our customers enjoy a good ol’ pen-and-ink experience.  Some even sent in hand-written letters.  Oh, how I loved them. 

Everyone in the family gets involved with the yellow newsletter and order form.  I write it, Mom and Dad go over it for additions and changes, Bob formats and proofreads it, and then the kids sit with us at the table stuffing envelopes, adding stamps and addresses. It feels like each person’s hands cross each customer’s letter, and it becomes a pledge:  We will do this for you this year — we will move your chickens to fresh pasture, and take care of the baby lambs and feed the pigs and box up your beef….Will you promise to commit to us in return?  The whole process feels so much more real. It is our first rite of spring.

The thing is, we just aren’t polished folks.   Turns out a lot of our customers aren’t, either.   And while the digital realm definitely serves us, it can also enslave us.  There will always be experts to advise us on the next thing we should be doing as business owners to attract and retain customers.  But there will also always be that ongoing relationship between a business and her customers, a culture defined by the unique individuals themselves.  Here at Sap Bush Hollow, I’ve learned that polish impresses very few of our customers. We do our best to keep clean and neat, but what our customers seems to value most are our hearts, spirits and the joy we bring to the work we do each season.  And that simple bright yellow newsletter that should be showing up in your mailbox any day now is a symbol of that joy.  

Not sure you’re on our USPS mailing list?  Email shannon@sapbush.com.  You can also download the newsletter and order from here.

*Yes, I apologized for telling her to throw them out!