We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Schad a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Our primary business is producing and selling honey. Other beekeeping operations might focus on pollination services, or selling bees to hobbyists, or raising queens. Of course, other operations might also focus on producing and selling honey. But we do that different than the others. Most honey producers let the bees do their thing through the entire bloom season, and then pull (harvest) the honey at the end of the season. Here in Southeast Minnesota, we have a variety of nectar/honey sources from plants and trees across several months. Those plants and trees each produce honey with a unique color, scent, and flavor profile. So we pull honey multiple times – early June, early July, mid-August, and late-September. Same bees, same locations, but the honey is different because the blooms are different from month to month. It’s a LOT more work, but definitely worth the effort.

Chris, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I sometimes say our beekeeping business is a hobby that got out of control. That’s maybe a little bit true, but when I started wrangling bees in 2012, I thought it was something I might want to turn into a business.

My original business partner and I started making equipment (like bee boxes) for beekeepers while we learned how to manage bees. Eventually we dropped that business line when big box retailers got into the business of selling equipment. So we focused on raising bees and producing honey. At the time we were producing what we now call “all summer long” honey, just like everyone else.

In 2019 my new business partner – John – and I figured out how we could differentiate ourselves from the hundreds (thousands, really) of other small beekeeping operations selling raw honey. That’s when we started pulling honey multiple times in the season. And then we started putting bees on fields of buckwheat to produce buckwheat honey – it is SO good. Just this year we added an August-only honey. We noticed our bee yards adjacent to restored prairies were producing honey in August when the honey flow was pretty much shut down in our other yards. We branded that as our August Kiss honey – one last sweet kiss of summer.

We now have six different honey products – Spring Bright (May), Summer Solstice (June), August Kiss (August), Autumn Bold (September), Buckwheat Stout (buckwheat), and Wildflower Classic (all summer long). We tell people they should expect more from their honey!

We’re passionate about supporting pollinator habitat (like prairies) and educating the public about the need to support pollinators. We teach beekeeping classes multiple times per year. We ship product all around the country, and we’re in dozens of stores in our little corner of the world.

Managing bees – keeping them alive and healthy – is hard work these days. We’re up against a lot of trends that are not in our favor – chemicals in the landscapes, changes in landscape and farming practices. Supply chain and inflation piles up on top of that. But we persevere – we do the work most people don’t see so they can have a little bit of sweet in their lives.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We are in the community – a lot! We do farmers markets, festivals, events, art fairs. You name it, we’ve tried it. We have a good sense of where to find our target market…foodies who want to experience their food, not just ingest fuel. Being present keeps us top of mind. We’ve found new retail partners, new coffee shops, new brewery partners, all from being at events. But that effort isn’t scalable – there are only so many hours in a day and days in a week. So we use social media to extend that sense of being “in community”.

When we post an Insta story (@shedthebee) or a FB update (@thebeeshed), we try to be authentic. Sometimes it has nothing to do with bees. Sometimes it is a “behind the scenes” look at how we process the bees wax. It may not be amazing quality, but it’s real and authentic.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

For me (Chris), this is a side hustle. My day job keeps me plenty busy, so I need to be super-organized about the days and weeks in front of me. Bad weather can throw things off – like if I planned on getting important stuff done in the bee yards on a weekend that ended up being rained out. So being flexible, being organized, and being creative has been necessary. I get business stuff done early morning and in the evening.

Key milestones: we sent out bees somewhere warm over the winter of 2018/2019. That was a risk- but they came back reasonably healthy, and that’s when we figured out they were healthy and strong enough to harvest some early spring apple blossom/dandelion honey. That was our first seasonal honey – we now call it Spring Bright. We grew the seasonal product lines from there.

Another key milestone – Covid hit the same year we were planning a refresh of our brand and our website. Having a little more time on our hands meant we could get those done. And it turns out our bees did a bit better that year, and we hit our stride in terms of finding our target markets. So 2020 and 2021 were years of significant growth.

Our 2022 season is building on that, but the return to a more normal pattern of day-job work (including travel) has created some real challenges. Maybe some day this becomes the full time thing – it seems to be approaching a size and scale where I’ll need to make a decision about that.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thebeeshed.com/
• Instagram: @shedthebee
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBeeShed
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-schad-48393813/

Image Credits
Chris Schad