Red Clover Herbs & Market

Idaho Falls is the original, major, kick-off point for our herb business. After friends of ours convinced us to move here in 2011, jobs were hard to come by. I had to take temporary jobs, or jobs where I had to travel to be at, such as working on the painting crew at the LDS Boise, ID Temple renovation. Or, I had to work in Canada, Missouri, and Texas for a dome construction company. Liesl was also looking for work, too. Initially, she began going around to different shops to see if they would place the tea blend in their stores, but a better idea came, albeit one that was far outside our comfort zone. This idea involved taking the tea to the Farmers’ Market. You see, your friends and family can tell you all sorts of good things about your product, but you really don’t know how good a product is until you take it to the streets and let strangers try it. The Farmers’ Market was too hard to get into at the time, but the Artisans’ Market across the street let us in (I was back in town and was able to help). A good friend of ours named Lescley, gave Liesl (and me) the courage (Lescley seems to be fearless) to go and take our one-and-only product to the Market. With 500 dollars from a tax return, and some borrowed equipment...to market we went. In less-than half a season (we started in July), we payed ourselves back, returned the borrowed items, and bought our own equipment. Eventually, the next season we made it into to the regular Farmers’ Market, and it went over very well. It went well enough that we were just able to pay our living expenses with it - and that was only 4 hours a week of sales time.

Early on in this article, I mentioned a problem we had to solve. The problem is that when people want or need something, they can’t always wait until Farmers’ Market is open on Saturday morning to get it. So, people would call on the phone and Liesl (sometimes me too) would go and meet them in various semi-convenient parking lots in town. It was happening more and more, and was getting very inconvenient for us and the customers. Looking for good locations to place a product is harder than it seems. However, one day, a guy named David Hay, who had bought some of our Red Clover Blend from us and loved it, told Nancy about it and she called us from her store called Herbs for Health. At first, our blend was placed there on consignment, next thing you know, we had a regular business to to run (without going into all the little details). Now, we sometimes open our store for marketeers to place their products on consignment. It’s our way of paying that forward. So, the solution was to own our own store with regular hours, open six days every week. And, both Liesl and I have regular jobs that bring us home every night!

Now the real work begins! We operate our store with no loans (except what we owed for the asset liquidation – which is almost payed for) using Dave Ramsey’s methods. Slow growth is good – it helps us to keep from making the really big mistakes, and we know what the actual health of our business is. We are not surviving artificially on OPM (Other People’s Money). So please, tell all your friends about us. We have some great ideas on the direction we want to take this business. We would also love to hear from you about what you would like to see from us. We have a website and a page. Soon the website will be renovated to become phone compatible. By the way...Red Clover is 2 1/2 years old this month!

Thanks for shopping at Red Clover!