Company Blog

Your Signature Story

by Adam Zack — February 10, 2016

Easy peazy

At every store I visit I ask, “What is your signature item?” In other words, what are you selling that your customers can’t get anywhere else? They talk about, crave it and will make a special trip to your store just to get it. Very seldom is the answer “We don’t have any.” Some answers have been: Our chicken salad. Our marinated tri tip. Our sausage. Our bakery. Our carne asada. Our guacamole. Our pico de gallo sauce. Our cookies. Our soups. Our brownies. Our BBQ. You get the idea, there have been lots, and they are really good products.

So yay! Wooo! We have signature items. And even better, they invariably have a great story about how the item was originally created and how it became so popular. Like “My grandma was carrying a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough and she tripped over the cat. The dough flew out of her hands, landed on the counter into a big pile of coconut and macadamia nuts. Having been raised in the depression, she was super frugal and instead of throwing the batch out she made the cookies anyway. They were so good we started baking them at the store and now we can barely keep them in stock.” You go grandma.

So then I ask, “How are you identifying these cookies? Do they have a special name like Grandma’s Chocolate Hawaiian Delights? Do they have a branded decal? How do I know they are special? Probably 80% of the time they are not branded in any way. No signage, no catchy name, no story told. In fact, most of the time the employees don’t even know the story. They just know that they sell really well.

So, here’s your assignment: What’s your signature item? What’s the story behind it? How are you telling it?

Easy peazy.