Peace, Love, and Stickers with Be Hippy
Be Hippy joins us in this episode of the Stickers on the Mic Podcast. Learn the history of this lifestyle brand based out of Denver, Colorado, and how they continue to build their business and community. From stickers to hats, and how they met Bertha, the Be Hippy VW Bus that has helped grow their brand across the country at music festivals, community events, and more.
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Announcer: Welcome to the Stickers on the Mic Podcast brought to you by stickergiant.com. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. If you're a regular listener, thanks for tuning in. In our podcast, we interview our customers to hear their founder stories. We talk business, marketing, growth, and of course, stickers and labels.
This month, we sat down with Leigh and Bart from Be Hippy. They tell their story of how they built a lifestyle brand one sticker at a time. We talk music festivals, road trips, groceries marketing, their first retail store, and so much more. Without further ado, here's our interview with the Be Hippy team.
Part 1
Host: Bart, Leigh, let's just get right into it. How did Be Hippy come to life?
Bart: Leigh and I introduced the brand to the world in January of 2014. Prior to that, we came up with those two words "Be Hippy" playing around with a few ideas and ultimately, came up with our design in the mountain and the sunshine which encompasses all of these things that are Be Hippy, the lifestyle. We threw it on a hat and put it on Facebook and sold out immediately. To make a long story short, six months later, we quit our day jobs, hit the road mostly doing music festivals around the country. For forty-two straight months, we traveled from Florida to California and everywhere in between just trying to get the brand in front of as many eyes as possible.
Leigh: Grow it grassroots.
Bart: Yes. Grow it grassroots and try to meet everyone. Shake their hand and explain what our vision for Be Hippy is.
Leigh: Be Hippy is really just a play on "Be Happy". It's living the life that you love and doing things that make you happy.
Host: That makes sense. I was doing research before this thing. You had to trademark that phrase.
Bart: Yes.
Leigh: We did. Yes.
Host: Like you own that phrase now?
Bart: Yes. It's very interesting that we threw the idea-- Well, I have a friend who's an attorney and thankfully--
Leigh: Thankfully from the beginning we were advised to start the trademarking process because--
Bart: We did that real early before we introduced that in January. Interestingly enough, he mentioned to us that it doesn't look like anyone's even ever trademarked that or tried to trademark here or anything which is amazing to us and--
Leigh: To all of our customers because it's funny that I walk in and then say, "Is this trademarked? Do you own this?"
Bart: "You two came up with that?"
[laughter]
Leigh: Yes. We did.
Bart: Easy now.
Leigh: "You two started this?" "Yes. That's fine."
Host: That probably makes the whole presence a little bit easier than having not having somebody else tried it before
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Absolutely. Yes. We always say that Be Hippy found us when we were ready. We were ready and it presented itself to us.
Leigh: We had no intentions of starting a lifestyle brand. We really didn't. We thought Be Hippy play on "Be Happy" was cute. We would put it on a hat and a T-shirt and sell it to friends and family. Really. We didn't expect the response that we got.
Host: 7,000 facebook followers.
Bart: Yeah.
[laughter]
Bart: The response was phenomenal. The evolution of the whole brand and the meaning behind the brand has been really interesting. It's been exciting.
Leigh: Positive. They love those two words. They love the feeling.
Bart: It evokes emotion. That's the beauty of those two words. It evokes emotion and it's always positive. This world needs a lot of positivity if that's a word.
Host: Yes, that’s a word.
[laughter]
Leigh: It's fun to see people.
Bart: We joke a lot but we truly are trying to change the world. We're trying to change it in a positive way. Just a simple smile can change the world, just like our smile T-shirts that we introduced last month.
Leigh: We did it, yes, the limited edition.
Host: It was a very limited edition and the response was amazing. That T-shirt evokes emotion, it makes people smile. The brand, in general, it's taking on a life of its own. It's been extremely exciting. We are actively involved with 1% for the planet which allows us to give 1% of our gross sales back to grassroots environmental organizations. Those folks that have feet on the street, they're actually doing some real work in a real positive work in the world. We're excited about that. We're involved in the music scene. This all began at music festivals for Be Hippy.
Leigh: When we started the business and we saw that it was starting to take off and that we were at a point that either we were going to leave our day jobs or we were going to let Be Hippy go because it was starting to consume so much of our time. We decided, "Okay. We'll leave corporate America and well, this is something we're passionate about, it's fine, and how we are going to spread and grow the brand”. We were like, "Well, we go to these music festivals. We see people set up, selling their stuff, maybe that's how we'll do it." Literally, we just started applying to music festivals.
Bart: It get to the point that we were applying to music festivals all over the country. It was amazing. Our first fest was in St. Petersburg, Florida. We're driving into Florida with a truckload of Colorado-branded merchandise.
Leigh: [laughs]
Bart: I looked at Leigh and said, "This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life." We had a one-day festival in St. Petersburg and just the response was--
Leigh: Amazing.
Bart: It was really overwhelming. It was crazy. We went back three more years in a row I guess.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: [laughs] Sunshine Music Festivals.
Leigh: Sunshine and Tedeschi Trucks. Puts it on every January and--
Bart: It's fabulous.
Leigh: Yes. We had the Colorado flag. We had Be Hippy on the front of everything but on the back, we would put Colorado. Lo and behold they asked, everybody loves Colorado.
Bart: Yes. That's right.
Host: It was this 2014, you say?
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: It was.
Host: Everyone really loved Colorado in 2014. [laughs]
Bart: Yes. It was good timing. It was not planned on our part.
Leigh: Yes. The timing of Be Hippy just in general.
Host: It's interesting the whole hippy thing because there's so many different ideas of what hippy means. Some may differ in visuals that they come about. We're seeing an interesting move in society in general. Young folks are wanting VW buses. People are listening to the music that I grew up listening too. It's very interesting. We're seeing a nice push towards those ideas. Towards more environmentally conscious sustainable type ideas, non-GMO, organic, all those keywords and--
Leigh: Wanting to feel a part of a community and a movement, Be Hippy seems to be headed in that direction. Sometimes we are just riding the train. We were driving it but--
Host: Just like shoveling coal.
[laughter]
Leigh: Keep it going
[laughs]
Bart: That's a great analogy. Maybe we would be spinning the fans.
Host: Yes.
[laughter]
Leigh: Yes.
Host: So the van, when did that come along? You have the hat, the trademark...
Leigh: Pretty quickly. That spring, several friends of ours, one in particular mentioned to us that, if you have a company named Be Hippy, you should look into getting at VW bus. We started the process. It actually happened pretty seamlessly because a friend from Memphis recommended that he knew someone in Evergreen who restored VW busses.
Bart: We touched bases this group of guys. There's a bunch of them that lived up in Evergreen in the area. They all have multiple buses. Their just a cool crew. We've ridden around with them and--
Leigh: Then, they're called the Mountain Micros.
Bart: Yes. Their tag is Mountain Micros. They're just a cool group of guys. Leigh and I driving up to meet one of the guys. He has a couple of different busses for sale. We're driving up in and Leigh goes, "I want an orange bus. I want it to be in 1968." I said, "Well, don't get your hopes up. The odds of finding an orange and white bus, that's the 1968, pretty slim we pull up.
Leigh: Because we're from Tennessee. Wherein July, where we went to college was the color and --
Bart: I'm born in '68.
Bart: Yes. Anyway, we pull up and the first bus he shows us is a 1968 orange and white bus. We're like, "It's meant to be."
[laughter]
Host: All the way?
Bart: Yes.
Leigh: [laughs] It was completely rested out on the bottom. There was a lot of restoration.
Bart: They completely redid it. There were several guys that helped us complete the project. It was fun.
Leigh: And spread the word.
Bart: Shortly after that, we were contacted by John Bukaty, who was an artist from New Orleans. He used to live in Colorado, but now lives in New Orleans and has a great studio down there. Anyway, he contacted us and said, "Hey, I would love to paint your bus. I've never painted a bus." John is known for painting live at music festivals. He'll get on stage with Santana or The Allman Brothers or whomever, and he'll paint live at the show and they may auction his artwork off for a charity or whatever. Anyway, he wanted to paint our bus and we said, "Well, let's do it live," so we--
Leigh: We had a blue dress festival coming up in Keystone, and so we organized it.
Bart: Yes, we jacked her up, we put a tent over her and-
Leigh: Thankfully. It hadn't rained.
Bart: - setup our booth next to it and-
Leigh: He painted the bus.
Bart: - he painted live on the show. It was killer.
Host: It's so fun having a character like we have, obviously at Sticker Ball already, a lot of people listen to our podcasts, a lot of listeners, we told certain things of Saul, but it's fun to have this anthropomorphized thing that people can associate with.
Leigh: Yes.
Host: Also, interact what they can. They don't put stickers on your bus necessarily like they do on Saul the Sticker Ball, but they take a selfie with the bus. When we were in the park, those people just skated by.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Yes.
Host: For the folks who are listening in, we have a great video that we promoted with them. Go check that out. That's on all our video channels. It shows us with the van in Washington Park in Denver, we had a really fun day, right?
Bart: That was a blast.
Host: A beautiful day and these people roller skated by on old school roller skates-
Leigh: With wigs.
Host: - with wig afros and I'm like, "I can't ride today, but--"
[laughter]
Leigh: They said, "Can we take a picture all over your bus?"
Host: That's probably what you get all the time.
Bart: All the time.
Host: Can I take a picture with your bus?
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Absolutely.
Host: That goes in its own way, tell us your stories that you're having to do anything.
Leigh: Correct.
Bart: Absolutely.
Host: It's still hard work doing what you do, but it very much takes the pressure off of you when someone can be that engaged with your brand. What we like to talk about on the podcast before we take a break here in a second folks, but let me talk about growth and marketing and how that comes together for your business, when you were growing to that 70,000 person Facebook audience, how did you get to a number like that? That's a really big kind of eye-popping number for us.
Bart: It is. We're not really sure.
Leigh: Honestly?
Host: I guess you know to ask a more business-oriented question, do you guys spend money on ads? We spend a lot on ads when we first came out.
Leigh: We do.
Bart: We do.
Host: You do.
Leigh: I wouldn't say that we spend a lot, but over the four years, it’s Bart and I--
Host: On your phones or your computers?
Leigh: This is it.
Host: A business manager app like you're just leveraging the Facebook platform?
Leigh: Yes.
Host: What other like--
Leigh: Consistently.
Host: Consistently?
Leigh: Everyday.
Host: Everyday? Right.
Leigh: For almost four years, we post photos. I think that has been a large part--
Host: Photos?
Leigh: Photos in music festivals.
Host: Then, the in-person, that was like the grassroots. I love that. We love we're coming. That meant a lot to us when we heard that but at the same time you got to get people on to your website, let's face it.
Bart: Yes.
Host: You know, to buy your stuff.
Leigh: We tell every customer, we give them a free sticker with our website on it. We've given out thousands at music festivals.
Bart: When people ask us-- We have so many people come in who are interested in how we got here and they may have a desire to leave their day job to do something similar and-
Leigh: To move.
Bart: - to move to Colorado or to hit the road doing festivals, whatever it may be, and they always ask, "How did you get there? If you could give me one or two things--" It's always hustle and stickers. Those are the two things I tell anybody that's starting a new business. Seriously. We have stuck stickers, literally, all over this country and they are stuck all over many countries now. In the beginning, our marketing budget was stickers, Facebook and Instagram. Those are the three places that we--
Host: You spent money on Instagram? Just to be technical.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Yes.
Leigh: Initially, it was just Facebook, probably, for the first solid year or maybe two years. That was--
Host: Your Instagram community seems pretty engaged. I don't remember how many people follow your account.
Bart: Yes.
Leigh: It is. I think it's about 11,000.
Host: That's what I thought, right. It's really eye-popping on Facebook but that's more of e-commerce engine anyway where you can put an ad like, "Get 10% off or see our newest thing," and there are better calls to action.
Bart: Right. Absolutely.
Host: That's really interesting and I think we, of course, love that feedback
Host: I think Facebook is usually a powerful tool while Instagram kind of tied into that.
Leigh: Yes.
Host: It's interesting, Instagram is more visual and probably almost more like community-based and less e-commerce based I think.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Yes.
Host: You can show your best self and even the behind the scenes where you're like, "Oh my god, these boxes are overflowing we got to send them all out. We love you all so much. Give us a week," or whatever. Especially for a young company, it peels back that layer. What's that really good story you were telling me just-- Where wasn't it when you first got your stickers and went on your first trip?
Bart: Yes.
Host: I don't want to skip on this one. It's a great little know.
Bart: We're at the point of diving in and leaving our days jobs and really giving 110% to Be Hippy. We realized that at that point we probably would not have another vacation for very long time. So Leigh and I took a--
Leigh: We were invited on a--
Bart: We were invited on an-
Leigh: Once and a lifetime trip.
Bart: -awesome trip to the British Virgin Islands. Traveling to the BVI's we stopped in San Juan, Puerto Rico-
Host: Puerto Rico, right.
Bart: -and we had just gotten our first run of stickers, our mountain logo. Leigh went to the ladies restroom and stuck a sticker inside the ladies stall and we didn't think much about it. We went to the BVI's, we stuck stickers all over the BVI's-
Leigh: Oh my God, all over.
Bart: -and you wouldn't believe all the pictures and the comments and people were emailing us and saying, "Hey , we saw your sticker here.", but our first really big order on our website-- We didn't start our website until the end of April of 2014. So, our first really big order came after our trip to Puerto Rico. Excuse me, our trip to the British Virgin Islands. A lady ordered about, it was like $280 or something like that. To us it was amazing.
Bart: It was like the biggest order, that one order was more than all of our others combined.
[laughter]
Bart: We were so excited
Host: You hit that plateau, you get to that mark though.
Bart: Yes, but we were so excited and she sent us an email saying, "The way I found you is that I went to the ladies restroom in the San Juan airport and I sat down and I looked up and there was a Be Hippy sticker and I Googled you right then." She placed order immediately.
Host: Power of the internet.
Leigh: Yes. The power of stickers and the internet, truly.
Bart: It really opened our eyes to the grassroots approach. We had also heard some interesting stories about software companies from Austin that had been bought out for hundreds of millions of dollars and the only advertising they ever did was stickers. They stuck stickers all over Austin, Texas. So we took all that information, we thought, "Well, we're going to do this. We're going to really--
Leigh: Make and effort to stick.
Bart: Yes, to stick. Everywhere we go to stick stickers and we have.
Leigh: We continue to stick stickers.
Bart: It's hilarious because at--
Host: You folks who are listening, you should see the smiles on their faces.
Leigh: Bart just stuck one out front on the way in.
Host: Like, "We love stickers. It's our job." I carry around dozens of stickers, these folks are smiling big smiles when they talk about stickers. I'm very happy to see the enthusiasm.
Bart: It's hilarious, we were at-- This has happened more than once, believe it or not. We're at a music festival just talking to folks and someone will come up and say, kind of quietly under their breath and not letting anyone else hear this, "We have one of your stickers on our car." We say, "That's great.", they say, "Well, we saw it on a gas pump at a gas station and we peeled it off and stuck it on our car."
[laughter]
Bart: We laugh and we said, "Here, here's a good fresh one for you."
Host: Here's five more put them wherever you want.
Bart: Yes.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Stories like that all the time. It has been a big piece of the puzzle. We have what, 30 plus different sticker styles now. We wouldn't have that if it weren't working.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: We're here to talk about Be Hippy, but we're also here to let your audience know that stickers have been a big part of the show-
Leigh: They continue to be.
Bart: -and continue to be, yes.
Leigh: Now that we have a kiosk at the airport.
Host: Those awesome stories that-- We have this beautiful sort of opener of where you come from and how it started to come together. There's some big things coming together and I made some notes, and Hamish did too. I have some timeline questions too, about that first year. That first year, again, with the Colorado brand you can see there's a lot of media coverage in Colorado in 2014. We can talk a little bit about that.
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Part 2:
Host: Hey folks, welcome back to part two of our conversation with Be Hippy. We covered a lot of ground in the first half. Especially talking about how they grew their business. We were chatting a little bit at the break about how they left off of their retail location and Hamish why don't you take it from there.
Host: I think that was an interesting point on how your stickers and your print media was feeding your website and you said people were finding your stickers, going on the website and putting in orders.
Bart: Absolutely, yes.
Leigh: Yes. Still. We get sticker orders every day, we get website orders thankfully everyday but stickers are a big part of what we're shipping out.
Bart: They're nice add on to-- You can order a t-shirt and a sticker and--
Host: It’s a couple of bucks.
Bart: Yes.
Host: You don’t even notice it. You were saying at the airport, at the Denver International Airport, you have a retail kiosk. Is that the only one of its kind for you right now?
Leigh: It is.
Host: You have a very unique sort of case study of how this works.
Bart: Absolutely.
Host: How long has this been going on? This seems really big for you.
Leigh: Two months.
Bart: Yes, we opened up at DIA on February the eighth.
Leigh: Towards the end of last year, we decided that being on the road has been wonderful for Be Hippy and for Bart and I, all the people that we've met along the way, all the great music that we've seen and just the traveling throughout the country, but we knew going into our fourth year that we were ready to maybe not be on the road as much and how can we make that happen.
Bart: Begin the process of really taking Be Hippy to the next level. We have been talking with the folks at DIA for about two years. We weren't ready two years ago. We were just in the last few months ready for that move. The way we did, we took the plunge. It's a very expensive, it's a very convoluted process when you deal with the governments and you deal with airports-
Host: The airport security just technically by the state. It’s a captive audience.
Bart: Absolutely.
Host: You have to go through security to deliver new stickers, more likely than not.
Bart: Yes. It's an interesting process but it also provides us an amazing place to test market new products.
Leigh: To be in front of a new audience every day.
Host: Nobody, it's always a new customer. Theoretically, they may have heard of you but like it's a one-off purchase but unless you have your frequent flyers.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: It's about 8 or 9 out of 10 people so far just from our loose statistics but Leigh and I worked at the airport. We're out there, we're working a shift, we work four or five shifts a week. We're out there meeting the people, were still telling our story, and we're still handing out stickers with our website on it. We're still doing all those things, but it's provided us an opportunity to test new products which is really cool. Within four or five, six days, we know whether or not a particular product is going to work or not.
Host: You can order like 250 stickers and then an idea--
Leigh: Correct.
Host: You could be like, this can last-- If you just said you almost sold like a thousand stickers in one day, depending on what it is if you have five or six then you are going to sell a cut like 20, 30, whatever the numbers breakdown. You're like, "This one, the classic logo continues to perform but I've seen some new designs coming through the shop too, like this 'Don't hurry, Be hippy' one."
Leigh: Yes,
Host: This seemed new to me.
Leigh: Yes it is.
Host: I was like ,"Great."
Leigh: We just launched it maybe two weeks ago. It's one of our best sellers.
Host: It’s so basic.
Bart: Yes. Everybody loves a bus and everybody loves--
Host: You had to trademark this phrase next, right?
Leigh: It is, yes.
Host: Of course.
[Laughter]
Host: Folks at home, obviously listening, wherever you're listening, you're like, "Of course, Andrew. Of course."
Leigh: We're learning.
Bart: It's interesting. We've already had entities steal our ideas and we have had those folks put them on Amazon and try to sell them and had we not had them trademarked, we would not have had a foot to stand on. When it comes down to it, the company is really only as valuable as its intellectual property. Without that, we really don't have much to stand on. Anyone who's starting a new company better take it seriously, and better go out and research it-
Leigh: Protect themselves.
Bart: - and protect themselves.
Leigh: Yes.
Bart: Because there are people who will take your ideas. It happens all the time.
Host: Right. I mean, in our space we notice a lot of-- It's competitive.
Leigh: Yes.
Host: We know this. It’s just how it is.
Leigh: Yes. The airport, it's been awesome for us. Again, we've only been there two months in where we're over the top on how well received the kiosk is and just that the people that we're meeting and that we're spreading the word-- Again, not everybody buys but everybody gets a sticker. If they stop and talk to us, they get a sticker with our website.
Bart: Our website behippy.com, we are seeing some action there that we feel like it's coming from the airport. Our social media site, we think has been impacted positively. It's almost like a music festival every day. We have had so many people coming through. The projections are 60 plus million people coming through DIA in 2018. Well, you can divide that in, however, many sections you want to, that's more than any festival, you will attend.
Leigh: It's thousands of people in the united terminal alone.
Host: Compared to even the population of Colorado, it’s a market eight times bigger than where you were.
Bart: Yes, exactly.
Host: It's the perfect place as well, we talked about the Colorado branding in the beginning, it seems like it's the perfect place to capture people visiting, tourists, probably has ton of locals coming through there as well. But yes, seems like the perfect place for you.
Leigh: It's awesome.
Bart: It’s awesome. We're getting a lot of international exposure because folks are flying-- there's a Tokyo gate right next to us. There's people flying to all over Canada and Australia from that terminal so, we're touching a lot of people and as it's exciting. Doing music festivals for the past three and a half, four years we could go to just about any festival and we wouldn't know people there, we would know a lot of people there. People would come in wearing our stuff.
Leigh: It was fun to watch it grow like that.
Bart: We started to think that man, we're really touching a lot of people with that. Now our situation has planted us in the airport and we were looking around and go wow, we haven't touched that many people. There are so many more people to touch and-
Leigh: Those people who haven't heard of Be hippy who are just stopping at our kiosk. So it's great.
Bart: How awesome is that for the brand to think about how much further we can go and how many more people we can touch and how much more we can contribute in a positive way to the environment. We've just recently started an Eco-line. We have we now have T shirts that are made from recycled plastic bottles. We're moving slowly but we're moving in that direction, we need to be more sustainable in the apparel that we present to the world and we need to lessen our footprint so to speak, environmentally and by providing products that are more sustainable, made from recycled goods and things like that, we feel like we can even broaden our touch.
Leigh: Make an impact.
Bart: We can have a greater impact and touch people in other ways. It's exciting and we're not really sure where this whole-- where this party is going to end but it's been fun so far and we feel extremely positive about the brand and extremely positive about where we're headed.
Host: Yes, I mean, that seems like a good segue. I was going to ask about some of the challenges for your business and what are the biggest challenges. It seems like sustainability is potentially one of those.
Bart: Well, it's extremely difficult to get a recycled t-shirt or organic cotton type t-shirt or a hemp t-shirt and-
Leigh: -and keep it at the price point-
Bart: -and keep it at that $30 range. To us, to go out and sell a bamboo or hemp or some type of more sustainable t-shirt then, we're going to charge 50 bucks. Our industry is slow but I believe the industry is going in that direction. I mean, just how long it took us to start carrying bags to the grocery store. Now I feel horrible if I don't show up at the grocery store with a bag. We humans move slowly and change happens much more slowly than we often times want but we're going in the right direction and with the new laws regarding hemp and things like that we will start to see more hemp based products, more sustainable recycled type of materials available at more reasonable prices moving forward and we're going to be one of the ones in that mix that's trying to spearhead that and push that change forward.
Host: Yes. It sounds like it aligns perfectly with the Be hippy movement.
Leigh: Yes.
Host: You want to be positive. You want to be friendly.
Leigh: We want to give back.
Host: You want to move, not just to your business but sort of the wider industry.
Leigh: Absolutely.
Host: In the right direction.
Bart: Yes.
Host: Awesome. Back to starting a business. Do you have any tips that you wish you'd known when you started that you'd be able to pass on to somebody else who might be starting a lifestyle brand, any business really. What do you wish you'd known? You gave them that great nugget in the first half, where you were like hustle and stickers. That's cool. What, especially as you think back?
Bart: Well it's funny because we didn't plan to do the we did not set any money aside, we did not--
Leigh: There's no business plan.
Bart: There's no business plan in place.
Leigh: We're still very grassroots that our entire company is still headquartered out of the basement of our house.
Bart: We hired our first employees when we opened up the kiosk.
Leigh: Yes, before, it was the Bart and Leigh show, and now, we're dealing with running it more like a business.
Host: Yes, your people and the payroll.
Bart: Yes. We are being forced into running it like a real business. It's a good thing because we are becoming more efficient. We're getting systems in place. We're really starting to pay attention to pricing. Up until now, if we could make something and turn it and make a little, we're happy. Well, we've realized that we've lost money on a lot of those deals because we were just running so fast and going in so many different directions. We have pulled the reins back, so to speak and we've taken a deep breath, and really tried to slow down a little bit, and think this stuff through, and make more wise business decisions and not have so much waste because there was a lot of waste in the beginning. We ordered the wrong sizes of things. We ordered the wrong colors of things. That's where the airport kiosk is allowing us to streamline the process a little bit, get more sophisticated systems in place that can help us monitor inventory and really test market. We can order 25 t-shirts and if they don't work we are not out of a whole lot.
Host: They'll sell eventually, it's not --
Bart: They'll sell eventually at some point.
Leigh: I think for someone starting a business, something that we made a good decision and we didn't really know in the beginning. We tried to keep everything local from having our stickers made right here to all of our T-shirts are printed in Denver. Our jewelry is handmade in Denver. That has been helpful as a business and just having being hands-on with everything.
Bart: Right. It's close by. We can drive--
Leigh: Having a close connection with the printers, with our head company that's been around since 1965. They're out of Englewood. Literally, we try to keep everything as local as we can just to help support and get back and grow our business.
Bart: And support our community, but also, I can jump in the car and I can be here in your office if I have an issue.
Host: Technically speaking, yes.
Bart: It's nice to build, to have those relationships. We're about relationships. We want those long-term relationships. We want that those relationships to grow, both sides to benefit and both sides to learn from it etc.
Leigh: You have to be willing to be open to ideas and trying. Bart and I did Farmer's market for our first year before we started doing music festivals. A lot of people coming to farmers markets weren't necessarily wanting to spend $30 on a hat or a T-shirt. There were a lot of--
Host: It's a very different customer.
Leigh: It was but we would try anything. We did beer festivals, took a trip to San Diego --
Host: Gosh. That sounds like a nice tangent there, the San Diego trip
Leigh: No, a lot of styles. You don't know. You don't know it but we felt like almost every time we put ourselves out there, even if we just drove, Bertha to down to a coffee shop and open the bag, sold hats for two hours, we always meet really great people. You never know where that conversation or relationship is going to take you, to who you meet when you put yourselves out there.
Bart: You have to put, be want to put yourself out there. We would do parties to people's houses. They would have a party, we would just show up, and open the bus, and start selling hats.
Leigh: We've had tons of support from them.
Bart: Thank God for friends, yes.
Leigh: Yes.
Host: That's a couple great tips. Try stuff and it’s cool to come full circle back to that grassroots, like you said, you got to be there with your product.
Bart: Something else has been extremely important and valuable and it's getting involved in something that's having a positive impact and giving back.
Leigh: To aligning yourself with a cause.
Bart: If I'm buying this $30 hat from Be Hippy, I know that 1% of that $30 is going to the 1% For The Planet organization. It feels good to know that by buying this T-shirt, this hat, or this piece of jewelry or this sticker, that a percentage of that is going to help the environment in a positive way. The world that we live in respects that and is respecting that more, hopefully.
Host: Nice. We will chat a little bit, your bus has this brightly colours, beautiful hippy van. This year is 50 year anniversary of Woodstock, do you have any ideas around that? Have you ever thought about that?
Leigh: We have thought about it. We've talked with a graphic designer about coming up with even if it's just a sticker, it may not be a t-shirt but we do want to recognize it and celebrate.
Bart: I have actually talked with the guy who owns the license and rights for the Grateful Dead. They wanted us to do something.
Host: I guess it's not until August 2019. You got them here.
Bart: They're wanting us to do something with some grateful dead image, be hippy and incorporate that all together. There's a lot of ideas out there.
Host: I bet.
Bart: A rainbow stickers are great one. That says a lot of Woodstock which all over.
Host: Yes, somewhere out there something, that's a big. Actually, this is like the summer of 67, 68, 69. There's going to be a lot of 50 year anniversary of this. Pretty well a couple of years ago. We're just so grateful that big party too. We just seem this constant 50 year retrospective for the last couple of years, it's just interesting for a brand like yours in the popular culture to-
Bart: Like we said, we were ready and be hippy, presented itself to this. The timing we wish we could say that it was planned but it was not planned at all.
Leigh: No.
Host: That is actually a natural stopping point for our conversation today. Hamish, do you have any follow up you want to add in?
Host: I was just going to say that's a wrap up. If you want to shout out your social media links, also, your website as well. Let everyone know where they can find you and check you out.
Leigh: For sure. Instagram we are peacelovebehippy, our Facebook page is Be Hippy and our website is Behippy.com. B-E-H-I-P-P-Y-.-com.
Bart: Facebook is PeaceLoveBeHippy also.
Host: There you go. Yes, cool. If any of you are flying through Denver, you can see the retail kiosk and what's the concourse again?
Bart: We are in concourse B on the west side.
Leigh: United.
Bart: United terminal.
Host: Pick up that Colorado gear to today?
Bart: Yes, you can take that. Leigh and I are usually there.
Host: That's awesome. That is a lot of hustle.
Host: Nice to go say hi and get that story first hand.
Host: Yes, it's not like close. You're living in Denver. That's a little bit of a hike.
Host: Yes. It's a day to day business that's a good effort on for you all. Thank you everybody, of course, for listening. We will be seeing you next month for our next installment. We'll get you at the speed on that guess in the near future. For myself and Haimesh, thank you very much for listening. You can find us of course, in all your podcatcher locations. Don't forget, every sticker has a story. What's yours?
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