We were lucky to catch up with Genevieve Nance recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Genevieve thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The main premise for my capstone project during college was to create a successful business in 6 months. Which isn’t quite an easy ask, but each of my classmates and I had backgrounds and education in marketing and business management.

My teams initial idea was a naturally flavored hard honey candy. We held surveys and focus groups to find out what flavors people wanted to see and if this was a product they would buy for themselves or their children.

Everything was going very well until we realized rather abruptly that we didn’t have the budget or the time to perfect the candy over the course of the program.

But we had this naturally infused honey, in flavors that people loved. The pivot in our business was the most natural thing I have ever experienced.

We moved forward with infused honey, and started selling at markets and online.

Infused Honey is a relatively new idea as a product, most of the flavored honeys you see either have the flavor come from the pollen the bees come into contact with or with oils and extracts (which tend to overpower the flavor of the honey itself).

Currently we have 4 flavors, each with a wide selection of uses and potential recipes. Although we are currently workshopping 4 additional seasonal flavors that will be fully launched for the end of fall.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

While we were still doing this as purely a school project, the majority of my role was creating and then maintaining our website.

Since our graduation, we have had a couple of leadership changes. I have taken on that role and am now responsible for all of our events coordination, maintenance of the website, packing and shipping online orders and negotiations with other businesses to get our product in stores.

I would say that one of the biggest things to know about any small business is that the people who are involved tend to wear many hats when it comes to what they contribute to their business. And that with each person you see publicly working on the company the are at least ten more people that helped them to get to that point.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We have had a steep learning curve when it comes to the production of our product.

We are currently producing everything ourselves, by hand. Eventually we will need to go into business with a Co-Packer, but we have not felt the need yet.

Our first iteration of our product came in round jars, they were very fragile and didn’t ship well. Our labels were not transparent, so our customers could not see the honey in the jars.

Today we have hexagonal jars in two sizes (3 oz. and 13 oz.), the jars are practically indestructible and our labels are clear except for their text.

We have found that for us it was hugely important to provide total and exact transparency with our customers, so for us a huge selling point is to tell people exactly where we source each part of our product.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I would say both the transparency of our sourcing of the honey we sell and that we let people try the product before they buy.

We provide people with resources and recipes on how they can use our product. We have had a decent turn out at each market we’ve attended and have been blessed by the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

People try our product, buy some, tell their mom about it and then BOOM, at our next event she buys some too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rainierhoneyco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rainier_honey_co?igsh=OXQxNjFoZmN4NmVo

Image Credits

Genevieve Nance