We were lucky to catch up with Christie Merandino-Jackson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Christie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

About 5 years ago Hurricane Irma was coming to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where I was living and working as a brewery taproom manager. Everyone was told to evacuate. I couldn’t find a flight out anywhere that was any-what affordable, except to Kansas City. A city I’ve never been to before, and knew absolutely nothing about and did not know anyone there either. I chose safety and booked the flight, which in turn, changed the course of my life.

5 years later I’ve now moved to Kansas, I’m married to the love of my life, I’m a home owner, I’ve added another rescue dog to our family, I have more true friends than I’ve ever had, and have a job that I love and work for people that always treat me with respect.

The risk was stay around in a place I knew and was comfortable in or to take a risk and go to a new city. I choose the new city. To anyone with a flight still in their cart or thinking if they should take a risk or not, take that flight to somewhere new. I can tell you from my POV it’s worth every penny! ❤️

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 background and context?

I became interested in craft beer when I was in college. I went to all the local breweries (not many at the time) and would make days off into trips all around the USA to go to different breweries. I went to Florida and was at a brewery explaining the beers to one of my friends when the bartender asked me if I just liked beer or worked in the industry. I told him I just moved to Florida 5 days ago and was looking for a job as a Dental Assistant. I decided to take him up on his offer and started bartending part-time. About a year later, I became the Taproom Manager and worked there for about 4 years before I moved to Kansas.

After moving to Kansas, I helped open Transport Brewery in Shawnee, Kansas. We are a small micro-brewery with a community friendly taproom.

What sets us apart from other breweries is our unparalleled customer service. We have an exceptional retention rate with staff because we view staff as family. I personally manage the whole Front of House and bartend so I can understand the staff and customers. This creates a unique and precise view into what we need to do as a brewery and what customers expect.

We try to give back to the community as much as possible. Through COVID we had different activations with charities and local organizations to bring awareness to their missions all while trying to modestly keep us in business.

One of the fun things we did was create a dog calendar. We are a dog friendly brewery so we not only have gotten to know the people, but their dogs as well. We designated a different dog, or dogs, to each month dressed up or in appropriate scenery and sold the calendars for Christmas. We then donated a majority of the proceeds back to a local dog rescue in the area that needed support.

Through doing that, we were advertised nationwide, the customers were engaged and appreciated, staff was happy because it added sales numbers which brought in more tips, the owners of the dogs featured were able to send a gift far and wide and it gave back to charity.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I think I have always been intimated by Photoshop or Illustrator. When opening the brewery, I learned that we didn’t have a budget for an artist or illustrator, so in order to have a beer can or bottle release with unique art – I would need to create it myself. Through research I learned about easier programs like Canva or Poster My Wall.

We have a bartender that also has a photography hobby, so it was nice to feature her pictures as label backgrounds and add some text to make it a beer label.

That’s how it started. Then I learned how to create more original art and incorporate it into can labels.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think to be relevant in any industry you always have to pivot. If you stay the same, you won’t be as appealing as the next business, service or person that is keeping up with the trends and adjusting. During COVID, we set up an online store in 48 hours. We put our whole inventory online to keep our business open. I had to figure out how to create a web-store on our website and make it look professional. It was an interesting 48 hours, but we made it work. It worked so well that we had to turn it on and off because we were running low on apparel and beer. So I guess it all worked out.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.TransportBrewery.com
• Instagram: Transport Brewery
• Facebook: Facebook.com/transportbrewery
• Twitter: Transport_Brewery
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/transport-brewery-shawnee