The member we're profiling this week runs a three-person farmstead operation in the upper Midwest — a small herd, two aged styles, and until last year, almost no online sales at all. Her wholesale accounts had carried the business comfortably for a decade. When most of them went quiet in 2020, she did what a lot of our members did: she opened a storefront on a shipping platform in a weekend and hoped it would hold her over.
It held, barely, and not because the page was good. "I wrote it the way I'd talk if someone was standing at my counter," she told us, "which turns out to be a terrible way to write a product page. I used the word 'lovely' four times in one paragraph and never once said what it tasted like."
What she changed
She enrolled in this spring's Storytelling & Provenance in Marketing cohort — the same course we wrote about earlier this week — mostly because a fellow member in her regional group wouldn't stop recommending it. The exercise that stuck with her was the smallest one: rewrite your best-selling wheel's description in exactly three sentences, first sentence about the cheese, not the farm. "I'd been leading with my grandfather's barn for two years. Nobody buys a barn. They buy the cheese."
She also rebuilt her FAQ section from scratch, using the questions she used to answer out loud a dozen times a week at a table she no longer has — how long a wheel keeps once it's cut, whether the rind is meant to be eaten, what to do if it sweats a little in transit. None of it was new information. It had just never been written down, because for nine years she hadn't needed to.
What it changed for the business
She's careful not to overclaim what a rewritten page did on its own — she also added two new shipping tiers and started posting more regularly to a farm account the same month, so she can't cleanly separate the effects. What she will say is that return customers started replying to her order confirmation emails with questions the new FAQ was already answering, which she takes as a sign people are actually reading it now instead of skimming past it.
The wholesale accounts are trickling back this spring, and she doesn't expect direct sales to replace them. What she wants to keep is the habit the year forced on her: writing down, plainly, what the cheese is and why it tastes that way, instead of assuming a customer standing in front of her would just ask.
You don't need a full rebrand to start. Pick your one page that gets the most traffic and read it as a stranger would — no context, no memory of your farm stand, no idea who you are. If the first sentence doesn't mention the cheese itself, that's the sentence to fix first. Our Education Committee has a short worksheet built around exactly that exercise, available through the same program page as this week's course cohort.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.