We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Louise Converse . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Louise below.

Louise , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I was a bit of a strange child, already entranced with Blue Cheese at the tender young age of 4. I called it the “sweaty socks” cheese. Moving through my life I found myself pulled into cheese shops, and specialty foods stores, where ever I landed. Yet as in my adult years I lost the bravado of youth which was replaced with reverence. Amazement at what the cheesemakers. could do with so few ingredients to create a dizzying amount of cheese varieties. I started to record in my memory moments I loved about being in one of these shops, and others that felt like obstacles. The vernacular was a mystery. The cheesemongers behind their storied counters were intimidating. How on earth would I ever be able to order with confidence. I would lurk near the counter, listening with rapt attention to the customers before me ordered so when I was my turn I’d ask for the same cheeses not even knowing if they were remotely in my wheelhouse. I’d go to big box stores and do “drive by’s” with my shopping cart and toss in copious amounts of cheese, far too much for me and my husband. It vexed me. Here I was, a full adult, afraid to ask a question. Completely puzzled by what on earth cheese was. Finally on a business trip to the UK, (I was working at Harvard at the time in a senior admin role helping to run a multi-year, and cross Atlantic, research program) I’d added on two weeks to visit family, or so I said, but really I wanted to visit as many cheese shops as I could, because upon returning I had decided we were going to return to Sarasota to open a proper cheese shop, one where we would take away the intimidation from the cheese. With that I set about spending pretty much every waking moment researching, and reading, and eating, and asking questions. My commute was 3 hours so the journey was spent engrossed in as many cheese centric books as I could find. We found a spot in Sarasota, something smallish and modest, but with good bones, and visibility. Game on.

The idea hatched in May of 2011, and we opened in March of 2012. With the wind in my sails I got to work, sketching, measuring, counting pennies. Now I visited cheese shops in earnest taking note of how cheese was displayed, and how the cheesemongers approached a cheese. I took a bootcamp 4 day course at Murrays in Greenwich Village designed for people in the industry, or those looking to open a cheese shop. I kept drawing a line in the sand with the intention that if this was not for me it would be okay, I could stop the dream and go in a different direction. But every goal I’d set I found myself crossing the line. I cashed in any amount of savings and retirement that was waiting for a future life, because I was living right now, this was my third act.

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?

At the time I opened Artisan Cheese Company, the cheese landscape was slim pickings in Florida, in fact I could count the number of cut to order cheese shops on one hand, and even now, 12 plus years later, some of them have since shuttered. Perhaps it was foolhardyness that kept me going, or maybe because I believed so much that Sarasota deserved a cheese shop like the one I was creating. As long as I welcomed every customer authentically, perhaps I could take away that intimidation I’d myself experienced in cheese shops on my travels.

Not only that, getting cheese to Sarasota was incredibly hard. . We are so far away from hubs of distribution and when I approached distributors and asked if I could work with them, doors shut. No one had been successful in Florida, what made me think that things would be different for me? I took that question to heart.

I’d spent the better part of two decade working on a project measuring levels of civic engagement across America and how to create community. Back in school I got a degree in Graphic Design, and continued on to grad school studying the history of art and architecture. Further back than that, like many aspiring artists, I worked in hospitality, a trade that helped me learn how to speak to anyone. While these might not really be a background for going into retail, I brought that sensibility with me. I wanted to bring people together and connect them to where food comes from. I wanted to build community.

Now it wasn’t lost on me that the big box stores were pushing their way into the cheese industry in a big way, and I knew that what I did at the cheese shop had to be different. I had to give Sarasota and beyond a reason to struggle through traffic to find their way into my shop. I had to give them an experience. And we had to mean it.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

This question hits home for me. I knew that no matter what, payroll came before everything. Rent. Vendor payments. The light bill. During those first years we were bleeding money. My credit cards were maxed or non existent. How could I have been so wrong about a dream? At least it felt like that.

A fellow cheese shop owner, who has a great cheese shop in CT, pulled me aside early on and said that I needed to pull a paycheck for myself. I nodded my head and agreed it was a great idea knowing full well that I couldn’t do that. In fact it was some years before I gingerly took a paycheck for myself, meagre as it was. And many weeks I’d put it right back into the bank account.

But as the months turned into years, customers found their way to the shop via our active Instagram account. Slowly we were able to connect with distributors and bring cheese and specialty foods that had never before found their way to Florida, or the South, let alone Sarasota. Little by slow we found our rhythm. But Sarasota is a seasonal town and the populated empties from May to November, with September being the slowest month of all.

On one such September, I was sick with worry as this had been a very bad summer for the shop. Street construction had brought what little business we were able to foster to a standstill. And at one point the sidewalk was torn up outside our front door, a complete business ender right there. Had I come this far to fail? My husband and I escaped for a quick trip to visit with family up on Buzzards Bay in MA. Most of my time I was sat at the kitchen table, my back to the incredible September weather and salt air just beyond the window, I couldn’t enjoy any of it. Already I was hearing phrases lingering in the air from our friends “you did your best” , or “so many businesses fail in their first five years”. All I could say to myself was “NO”.

I’d started a monthly newsletter on the first month we opened. At first it was musings and a way to connect with family and colleagues who thought moving to Sarasota to open up a cheese shop when I had a career job at Harvard was some kind of confused folly. I’d write about the shop, about Sarasota, and about cheese, and a bit about life. As time went on, 35 people grew to a few hundred. I’d had a sign up sheet at the shop, and it turns out people actually still read old fashioned newsletters, especially if they feel like they’re written by someone. you know. So on that particular September 15 morning, my birthday, I sat down and wrote what I thought might be my last newsletter. I wrote from the heart, that we were struggling. that I didn’t know what the future held, and that I knew that lifting the veil in this way might be business suicide, but I was still holding on to the dream of the little cheese shop that could. I created cheese dollars, special gift baskets, and gift certificates, all of which could be ordered online. I also created incentives, and asked people to run a tab at the shop to which I would add on a % depending on the amount. I poured my heart out. I didn’t want to fail. I hit “publish” closed my lap top, and finally went outside to look out at the view.

I returned to my email six hours later. The very amount that I needed to cover payroll and rent was raised from kind and loyal customers who had read my newsletter and had rallied to save the cheese shop. Happy Birthday. I cried.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I was an early adopter of Instagram, all the way back in early 2011 when a photographer friend showed it to me as a vehicle to take images and share them. It was way before hashtags were a thing, or on my radar. I started following people whose images I admired, and since I was already doing research for the cheese shop, I put up a lot of cheese photos. Most of the photos were filtered using Hipstamatic and the Loftus Lens – David Loftus is an amazing food photographer in the UK – so we had a small group of people across the world who avidly used his lens on our iPhones. At this time I’d already changed my personal IG over to a business one for the shop @artisancheesecompany so a good 8 months before the shop even was open.

The social media space was already dominated by Facebook and Twitter, but I believed in the power of images, and devoted my time to creating my IG look and feel. At that time everything could automatically get shared to other platforms, so it was win win for me.

Eventually the filters fell off and iPhone cameras got better, and IG grew up a bit. I decided to lift the veil on the shop. I’d share about 2 or three cheeses. And then a product, and then a wild card image. It might be me fixing a leaking sink down on the ground, or something about the community that I loved. But always in my voice. It had to come from me, and not feel like a paid ad.

I remember hitting that 1K follower mark on IG thinking that I had truly arrived. And slowly it grew. When people with larger follower counts followed us, some of their followers would join on. That was back when you could see who followed who.
I kept it up, and the numbers grew and as a result people would find their way into the shop.

One day, all the way back in 2013,I posted about a cheese called Challerhocker, a cheese from Switzerland, one of those cheeses that was incredibly hard to bring to Florida, so having it on the counter was a game changer for us. Out of the blue a famous chef from the UK commented on my Challerhocker post, and shortly after started following me. I remember the very moment, standing in and aisle at Whole Foods, thinking “no, that’s a mistake, he’ll unfollow me soon”. I wanted to grab fellow shoppers and tell them that he was following us. And because of how IG was back then, his followers, started following me too. Within a few days my numbers grew. The lovely famous chef started commenting on my posts and over time we started a dialogue. It turns out that his family holidayed near here so they ended up coming into the shop and we have all since become friends. I’m protective of my friendship with the anonymous chef, but I can absolutely say that he kick started my IG. I think if I somehow capitalized on that connection in some way, I just wouldn’t have felt right. He just messaged me the other day.

I think the most important thing we do on Instagram is show the reality of running a business and the community we have created across the cheese and specialty food space. We are people. We have birthdays and partners, and good days and bad. I don’t take ourselves too seriously. And I have never let anyone else take charge of our IG account. It has to be us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://artisancheesecompany.com
• Instagram: @artisancheesecompany
• Facebook: artisancheesecompany
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louiseconverse
• Twitter: artisancheeseco
• Yelp: artisancheesecompany