We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gina & Meredith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Gina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
Our original idea was to have a name for the business & individual names for all the bars in our fleet; I kept telling Meredith if we ever expanded to owning a tap truck I wanted that bar to be named The Road Pop. We threw around so many business names and could not come up with one we liked enough to make official. After weeks of indecision Meredith suggested we just go with The Road Pop since we kept coming back to it; aptly named for a mobile bar in the Midwest!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
When planning my own wedding I stumbled across a beautiful mobile bar in California and thought to myself, “I could do that!” so I ran to Meredith’s office and asked if she wanted to start this business with me. She said, “Yeah, let’s do it” and we hit the ground running. Within 5 months we had a fully functioning mobile bar business thanks to a lot of late nights and countless hours of physical work by Meredith’s dad, Hank, building out the inside for us.
It means so much to us to be a vendor people choose to spend their most important moments with, and we do not take that lightly. The Road Pop strives to be a stress relief for these big moments – taking all the guessing and work out of this piece of your event.
We really pride ourselves on being all inclusive; not only do we handle everything bar related, but we make amazing mocktails so everyone can come up to the bar and find something accessible to them!
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
Meredith and I have worked together in many different ways over the years! We met at our grocery store job in our early 20’s, which was short lived because I started the first day of her 2 week notice. A few years later I found myself at my current job, which is where Meredith went after the grocery store. We worked there together for 5 years and developed a friendship & business that all feels very kismet!
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?
Not exactly “risky”, but definitely a huge step out of our comfort zone were the live interviews we did with our local news station! When the anchor reached out to us about doing 3 segments with her we knew we had to take the opportunity, but it took A LOT of pep-talks from family and friends to calm our nerves. We could not have been more anxious, but we set up all 3 bars to showcase what we offer, and made an easy summer-time drink on air with the news anchor. Everything turned out great, and I am so proud that we did something that felt scary! It was not only lucrative for our business (we had inquiries coming in between segments at 6am!) but gave us the confidence to push ourselves in new ways.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.theroadpop.com
- Instagram: @theroadpop
- Facebook: @theroadpop
Image Credits
AllHalMakeup Photography