We were lucky to catch up with Leslie Cockerell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Leslie , appreciate you joining us today. What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business
Covid hit us hard in 2020, My father Fred Reed, we all called him Big Fred, was diagnosed on the 11th of November and died November 25th, the day before Thanksgiving. He had driven to Chicago October 28th to pick up 7000 bottles and they were in his Borger, TX warehouse staring at us, I was at a loss, my husband, John and I had our own business, J&L Design, we remodeled homes and had two clients at the time, which was full-time. Big Fred had an employee, Layla that helped him part time in the warehouse and another employee, Beverly that helped him with the books, so his operation wasn’t big, he mostly had grocery stores and trade shows and a few online sales. John looked at me and said, To honor your dad, since he was our best friend, we will fill these 7000 bottles up, tell everyone he died and go back to our life in Oklahoma.” I agreed. There was a problem with that though, the recipe was missing. someone stole it out of the warehouse, Beverly, his employee saw them do it but figured they were part of the family and didn’t know them so she didn’t think it was her place to say anything. My dad made 30 gallons of this dressing at a time I had the recipe for a 30oz bottle, but not a 30 gallon recipe turns out John is great at math and we didn’t need the stolen recipe at all. I didn’t have the creamy recipe at all, I assumed that went to the grave with my dad. I had never met Layla because she only worked for my dad part time and when I was in town visiting my dad we weren’t working at the warehouse. John said that he could figure the recipe out but we would just have to have the one product now, until Layla showed up at the warehouse. My dad called Layla the very last time before they put a vent on him to tell her the last ingredient to the creamy, through my tears I asked her why he wouldn’t tell me and she said, he didn’t want you to worry, he knew that if he told you, you would know he was dying. Layla loved my dad like her own and asked if she could help fill up those 7000 bottles, that was 2 years ago and many thousands of bottles later, Layla is now a warehouse manager and we are happy to have her.
Leslie , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Leslie Cockerell, I am the owner of Reed’s Italian Dressing, LLC. I received my Marketing degree in 1994 at UCO and from there worked in outside sales for furniture, clean room furniture, and computer labs until I found my true passion, Interior Design. I worked with clients redesigning their homes, picking out furniture, paint color and organizing the chaos. My husband and I started our design business, J&L Design in 2012 where we flipped houses, six all together until Covid hit and in 2020 my business life as I knew it was over. My father, Big Fred, passed away and we made the decision to continue his business because if we let it die with him, we knew it would be gone so we sold the two houses we were working on finished up with the clients and started to learn about the salad dressing business, of which we knew nothing about. We figured it out pretty fast, we had no choice. Big Fred had big shoes to fill and the orders kept coming in. We make every bottle of low fat, low carb Italian dressing and marinade by hand. We label, fill and screw every cap on, box it and send it off to the happy customers. I never knew that I would enjoy this life because I loved designing, but hearing the stories of my dad, going to craft shows and meeting people and making a product that is delicious and puts smiles on peoples faces is something designing could never take the place of. I hear from customers everyday that they love our products and our customer service is amazing, I really think that people need that human contact and we strive to get that right. I answer every email and text and take phone calls, there’s never a break but people realize that and it pays off. A family recipe from the 1970’s made from scratch in our warehouse with love is what sets us apart from everyone else and the customer service is the cherry on top.
How did you build your audience on social media?
My father had never done any advertising, the occasional ad at the state fairs from the TV reporters because that was free, he just didn’t believe in wasting money, there was no talking him into it either. Boy was he wrong! John and I started doing some reels on FB and Instagram and had about 60 followers and about a year after that we were up to 100. John was looking into hiring someone to take over our website and do a little advertising, We thought we could do it on our own and so we signed up with a company called Merchant Mastery that coaches you every step of the way, When it was over our head, we hired their other company Socialite and they take care of all the ads and email campaigns and meet with us every Thursday to go over different campaigns and ideas. the very best thing we have ever done is hire them, our sales are skyrocketing and we are having to buy things in the thousands and it just keeps growing. We went from sending 5-10 orders a day to 100 plus a day and we are getting lots of followers now. My advice to anyone is advertise if you want to get your name out there!
How’d you meet your business partner?
My cofounder and business partner is my husband. He owned an oil and gas company, J&L Exploration, had four teenagers and had been divorced for 2 years when he moved next door to me. I made him cookies right before Thanksgiving and a few days later he asked me to help him shop for Christmas decor, right up my alley. We would watch each others dogs while we went on dates then we would get back and talk about how dumb our dates were. One day a few months later we went on our first date and that was it, we were inseparable after that, 4 years later we got married and have been together ever since. We took Love thy neighbor literally. We have an office in our home and we spend 24-7 together and we love it, we get teased about it but we are truly just best friends and wouldn’t have it any other way. He is retired oil and gas, but we laugh and say he is only retired gas, he still slings oil, just not the kind that comes out of the ground. We love to travel and we never thought that in retirement we would be traveling carnies, but life is crazy sometimes and I am fortunate he rolls with the flow!
Contact Info:
- Website: reedsdressing.com
- Instagram: reedsdressing.com
- Facebook: Reed’s Italian Salad Dressing