A Jam-Maker Found Her Recipe for Success

By STEPHEN GROCER

Editor's Note: This piece is the first in a new series about ways people generate extra income while working a regular job.

The entrepreneur: Carolina Braunschweig, 28, worked as a reporter covering the venture-capital industry for Thomson Corp. in San Francisco. During that period, she also began contemplating the direction of her career and considering ways to supplement her modest reporter salary.

The business: Ms. Braunschweig launched cmbsweets in June 2004, selling jams over the Internet at cmbsweets.com. Today her product line, which includes strawberry, boysenberry and olallieberry jams and apple-honey butter, is also sold in stores in New York, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The idea: Ms. Braunschweig and a co-worker, inspired in part by their job covering the venture-capital industry, would discuss "get-rich-quick schemes" over lunch. One day, the idea for a jam-of-the-month club struck her fancy. "I wasn't an engineer or doctor, so I wasn't going to come up with the next great technology or medical invention," Ms. Braunschweig says. She says she was drawn to the idea from California's numerous varieties of fresh fruit, her friends who worked in the restaurant business and having seen specialty jams sell for as much as $12 a jar.

Getting started: From the beginning, there were several hurdles she needed to overcome, among the first, learning how to make jam. After she first proposed the idea over lunch, Ms. Braunschweig picked up some strawberries at a farmers' market and began researching jam making. Shortly thereafter, she launched her business, sending out an email to friends and co-workers, asking if they wanted to join her jam-of-the-month club.

Ms. Braunschweig says determining her start-up costs is difficult. When she decided to attempt the venture, she assumed the amount of money needed to begin would be low -- just enough to buy a pot, some fruit, sugar and jars. But she says she soon realized it was more complicated. First, there were the costs associated with complying with health-code regulations, she says. She needed to pay $350 for a license from the San Francisco health department, and to make and sell her jam, the health department also required that she use a commercial kitchen, which she says costs between $10 and $15 an hour to rent.

The business plan: Ms. Braunschweig's business plan has evolved since she first conceived of the venture. During the first few months, she says, her efforts focused on selling to co-workers, friends and friends of friends. That changed in the fall of 2004.

In late September, a popular online magazine, Daily Candy, wrote a short article about her jams. That day, she says, her Web site received about 91,000 hits. Her site didn't have a page to take orders online, but she got hundreds of emails from customers with order requests. "That is when I first realized I could actually make a business out of this," Ms. Braunschweig says.

That led to the next evolution in her business. Ms. Braunschweig quit her job in October 2004, and the next month she upgraded her Web site, allowing costumers to order online.

But after months of filling orders, she discovered the inefficiencies of her plan. "The amount I received for filling a $10 order was mitigated by the amount of time I would spend putting the order together," Ms. Braunschweig says. That realization, she says, led her to shift from individual orders to building relationships with specialty shops, which order in quantity, while also promoting her product.

Her sales pitch to businesses is simple, Ms. Braunschweig says. She brings jam samples to stores for the proprietors to sample. Once the tasting piques their interest, she explains how she makes the jam -- using fresh fruit from small producers -- and then they discuss pricing. Packaging, she points out, is also crucial to her pitch. The label for each flavor tells a little story about what inspired its creation or the emotion it should elicit.

The pitfalls: Ms. Braunschweig admits she's hit her share of stumbling blocks. First and foremost was her inexperience. Having little know-how in the business world meant a steep learning curve. Not initially knowing about health-code regulations is one example. She also hadn't seen an order sheet prior to starting the business. For the first few months, she kept track of orders in a spiral-bound notebook until a friend put some order sheets in her hand. Finally, she points out, it took her a long time to realize that she should focus on stores instead of individual orders.

The payoff: Ms. Braunschweig declines to specify how many orders she receives a month or the revenue the business generates. But she is on target to reach her goal of signing on 20 stores to sell her jam by the end of the year. Since June, the list has reached 15.

Beyond the tangible business goals, Ms. Braunschweig still finds it exhilarating every time she gets a repeat customer.

"What I love about it is it's really, really neat to watch your own project grow and develop, to know that you've crafted this thing, and this thing now has a life of its own," Ms. Braunschweig says.