Kevin Dugan, pr impresario and top-notch blogger, alerted me to this Influx Insights piece. It’s a great example of the growing importance of story as a product differentiator.
The tale in brief is this: Seven years ago, Diane St. Clair didn’t know boo about making butter. But she wanted to learn so she taught herself the trade via the Internet and some books. Soon she cadged a “small-scale pasteurizer and got a license to go into production.” And with one Jersey cow, she went into business. She called her operation, based in rural Orwell, Vermont — wait for it — Animal Farm. One day, she sent her butter to Thomas Keller, an all-star chef. He proclaimed it the best butter he’d ever tasted — and ordered it for all his swank restaurants, as did many other fancy joints.
Today, St. Clair’s one-woman operation has six cows and continues to produce butter for the best restaurants in the country. Now she’s contemplating starting a butter of the month club that will offer subscribers a pound of butter a month for ten months for a subscription price of $750. That’s $75 a pound! As they say, margins like that are like buttah.