Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christina Brunner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Christina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

During COVID when we started to experience food and supply shortages, we realized how important it was to connect customers with local farmers and small businesses. We began researching what products are grown or produced in our state and discovered that so many items we use regularly can be found somewhere in North Carolina. We took this idea, and opened a store to help show our community that while large stores shelves were emptying, ours were filling. You do not have to rely on other countries to produce what we need. We first reached out to the various farmers and vendors we met over the years to get them on board and then began broadening our reach throughout the state. We also gave the smaller farmers and businesses who could not partner with larger chain stores a place to market their goods.

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?

We believe that quality food is essential. Knowing where our food comes from and how it is raised/grown is extremely important to us so opening a locally focused storefront made perfect sense to us. We are a small goat farm ourself, so we also know how important it is for smaller farms to have a space to market their products. Our main farm product is our goats milk soaps. We make them in small batches so for us selling in larger chain stores was not an option. Most of the small farms and businesses we work with are growing or making products on a fairly small scale and we are thrilled to be able to offer them an outlet for their goods. We are extremely proud of the growth that we have experienced in the last two years. We love being able to connect consumers with the goods that they desire.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Honesty, Honesty has been the most effective strategy for growing our customer base. They know that when they walk in our doors we are providing them with the best products and the best customer service possible. We are able to tell customers what farms things come from, when it was harvested or made, and if needed we are able to put customers and farmers in communication with each other.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We believe that organic growth for social media is best and has worked well for us. We avoid the gimmick “like us, tag a friend and comment below to win”. We want people to find us and connect with us because they want to, not because someone spammed them! We use a variety of hashtags throughout the day on our posts to help broaden our reach for potential customers. We also make sure our posts offer a wide variety of content and are not just focused on “these are the products we sell”. We make personal posts about what we are up to, post photos from around the farm, post photos of our meals that use ingredients we have in the store. It is important for our customers to connect with us on a personal level, because if they feel that connection, they will want to invest in us. This also goes back to our value of being honest – if our customers see us personally using the items we sell, they are comfortable buying those things from us and will also share that info with their friends, because they trust us,

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dragonfly-farm.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dragonflyfarmnc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dragonfly.farm.NC

Image Credits
Whitney Combs, Pure & Simple Creations