We recently connected with Amanda & Josh Hall and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda & Josh , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, one thing many business owners consider is donating a percentage of sales or profits to an organization or cause. We’d love to hear your thoughts and the story behind how and why you chose the cause or organization you donate to.

When we came up with this idea, we knew, one of our top priorities was donating a percentage of our sales to a local no-kill animal shelter for cats & dogs. We toured the FurKids cat habitat located in Cumming, GA. Seeing these rescue kitties living in such amazing accomodations so they can be more themselves, as they await to be adopted, we just knew this was the right fit.

We had no clue if we would even have a business at all, to be able to start selling our product and seeing that people were recepitive and saw our vision was insanely rewarding. To watch our business grow month over month and the sales continue, stopped us in our tracks and energizes us nite and day!! We were amazed when people started rounding up, their total orders to donate even more to Furkids. Being a part of and watching people do great things just because is pretty awesome. To see that our product, thru these monthly purchases, amounted to substantial monthly donations, has been overwhelming to say the least.

When FurKids let us know we would be a Sponsor for their huge annual upcoming event, we were completely shocked and speachless. Inviting our friends and family to join us at our table and being a part of that event as a Sponsor from a business we created was pretty awesome. Being able to represent the donations from every order, we we’re just truly honored to be there to say the least. To say we’ve been motivated and it constantly continues is an understatement! We have so many ideas we can’t wait to get underway on and keep going.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

ResQue Rubs is our rubs and seasonings business with a percentage of our sales being donated to FurKids animal shelter. We love our food, whether it comes off one of our Big Green Eggs smokers, off the grill, oven, pan sear or the air fryer, and combined with our love of our furbabies. So starting our small business bringing both together was a no brainer and at some point in the middle of Covid 2020, the idea came to us, let’s make rubs and seasonings and give back to the fur babies! The name ResQue Rubs can confuse folks sometimes, but we thought it was the perfect name. Resque for the furbabies and Que for barbecue explaining the cooking aspect! After many trial runs on different flavors we settled on a BBQ rub, an All Purpose Rub and a Steak/Beef Rub. We have more in the works that we are aiming to roll out here soon. All of our rubs are named after our fur babies, to make sure we can always remember them. We hope to be able to give back to more animal rescues down the line as we continue to grow and expand our business.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

From the start, before we even launched, we were in the kitchen making test rubs, trying to get the perfect blend. We would and still do write each measurement down, trying it on some chicken, pork chops or whatever we had at the time, just trying to find that blend. There were plenty of times, when there was too much salt, not enough taste, too much pepper, not sweet enough, but we kept track until we felt is was good enough to share. We had family, friends and neighbors that would taste test these rubs constantly as we cooked them in various ways and we finally come up with the 3 we have now. Once we got our cottage food license, we were allowed to make and sell our rubs out of our house and locally in Georgia. So we started making small batches of each rub and we still make the small batches today. We started in sealable kraft paper bags and had a couple of different sizes. We printed the ingredient labels, order ones with our logo and would seal them up to sell. Knowing all along that we wanted to move to shakers, we went through a few different suppliers but finally landed on the size shaker that we wanted. We had to learn how to use a heat induction sealer for the new shakers, plus the most exciting part, creating and designing our own labels with our story and pictures of our furbabies representing each rub! We worked with a local graphic designer which was awesome and we were so excited how the labels turned out and were also recommended a printing company for the labels through our partnership with Because Coffee, where we get our gourmet coffee beans that go in Duke’s Steak Rub.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

With our first year being 2022, we signed up for as many local events as we could, from farmers markets, to a mother’s day event, dog and cat rescue events, brewery vendor markets, fall festivals and christmas events to try and get the word out about ResQue Rubs. We met a ton of awesome people along the way that loved their furbabies and food as much as we do. There was one lady that we talked with that was having a feral cat problem in her back barn, she had been turned down by an organization the same week she met us and we told her about FurKids. She bought some of our rubs and left knowing she would be able to do the right thing for those cats by taking them to FurKids to find their forever home. We love selling our rubs and knowing that people will love them, but it’s even better knowing that we are helping the furbabies out there too!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.resquerubs.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resquerubs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/resquerubs