We recently connected with Matt Greene and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Matt thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
My child hood best friend and I had an outdoor fishing/hunting apparel company that we didn’t really love. It was just something to do and we started a podcast for it because we did have some passion there to record our conversations and put them out there for friends and family to hear. One day, we had this idea to do a segment of the podcast where we talked about deer season and “reviewed” a whiskey that we liked. We called that segment ‘Whiskey & Whitetails’ When the first Whiskey & Whitetails episode came out, we had so many people message or text us and say “That’s it! Do that!” So we shut down the other company pretty quickly and began this journey not knowing where it would take us. 3 years later and we still love recording our Whiskey & Whitetails episodes, we have designed products and apparel for the hunter/drinker. We have also started working with some amazing chef’s to create whiskey pairing dinners and classes.
Matt, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
For the average supporter of our brand, the main thing we are known for would be our Podcast and Instagram content. We both enjoy making reels and doing some photography, so Instagram is a great place to showcase that material. Once you get to know us some you will find out we have a store with hand crafted bourbon barrel products like cocktail smokers, cigar rests, and game calls. We also have a patreon for those that want to support us and help pay the bills that allow us to provide some of our content / travel expenses. The patreon has some great rewards as well as a discord community that you can join to hang out with us and some like minded individuals.
We also offer whiskey classes and that has been an amazing opportunity to share our knowledge of the spirit and the industry with hunt clubs and other establishments. We teach our classes unlike any class you have been to before as most of them are trying to promote a product. We do the majority of them blind and teach you about each type of whiskey / bourbon and do a grand reveal at the end to see what you like the most.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
We decided to sell everywhere we could and that was actually a good lesson. Our website and shop is powered by Shopify which offers pretty easy plugins to a lot of Ecommerce sites. One of the first places we launched was on Etsy and this was a very smart choice. We launched near the end of 2020 and our first full year on Etsy in 2021 was our most profitable year in business. Granted the bars being closed and everyone was bored at home was a huge help to that but it was a great way to get started!
Since then we have created TIN numbers for Amazon and are working on store set ups with bar codes currently as we get asked a lot locally where they can pick up orders. Amazon hasn’t been worth much of our time as the sellers fees are so high, so if you go that route I would recommend using the amazon fulfillment method and just shipping them a crate full of product.
Another great help has been our Podcast. We can promote our products along with discount codes and we are monetized with ads, so it covers all hosting fees and then some!
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We do make all of our barrel products in house! It all started with buying a whiskey barrel and figuring out what we could make with it. One of the first products was our cocktail smoker which we have sold thousands of at this point. It is cheap, lasts forever, has a guarantee replacement if you burn through it and is easy to use. One thing we learned early on was that not everything can be made in America. Torches for instance, there is only a couple of US made torch manufacturers and they don’t make the style that we need. So, we have to buy them online and have them shipped overseas. Air freight is not cheap and we can’t wait months for it to arrive by boat.
This caused a bit of a bottleneck for us trying to find the right supplier that could ship quickly and get product to us within 10-14 days. Once we found him, we stayed loyal to this day to them. Unfortunately, we learned that lesson the expensive way of buying product we can’t sell and eating the cost.
As for what we make in house, the product looks the same but the means of production has changed several times along the way. Practice makes perfect as they say, You make thousands of something, you eventually figure out the right process and way to set it up. Our best advice here would be to not give up! Make it happen!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://whiskeyandwhitetails.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whiskeyandwhitetails/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whiskeyandwhitetails
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/whskywhitetail
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUX9-ft9bLcrNMUMREwj4Dw
- Other: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/whiskeyandwhitetails
Image Credits
Whiskey & Whitetails