Most weeks, a spotlight in this space is built around someone's tenure or their title. This one is built around a weekend. In mid-March, a member who runs a small goat's-milk creamery in the upper Midwest watched two farmers markets and a wine-bar account cancel in the same 48 hours. By Sunday night, she had a plain order form up on a free website builder, a shared spreadsheet standing in for inventory, and a message posted to a neighborhood group asking if anyone still wanted cheese.
They did. We asked her about that first weekend, and she told us she had never sold a wheel without someone picking it up and handling it first, tasting a sample, asking a question about the rind. Selling sight unseen felt like handing over something unfinished. But the alternative was watching product age past its window in the cave with no buyer, so she filled the first week's orders herself, drove them around in her own car, and kept adjusting the spreadsheet as she went.
If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. We've heard versions of the same weekend from members in half a dozen states this spring: a canceled market, a hastily built order form, a car doing the work a table at a market used to do. What's different member to member is less the scramble itself than what each of them decided to keep once the scramble settled down.
What changed and what didn't
Six weeks in, the online list has become the steadiest channel she has. It isn't the biggest dollar amount she's ever moved in a month, but it's the most predictable, and predictable is worth more right now than it usually would be. A few things she'd tell another member starting from the same spot:
- Keep the order form boring. She tried a few fancier tools before settling on the simplest one she could find, because the goal was getting orders in, not building a storefront she'd have to maintain.
- Sell what you can describe in one line. Wheels that used to move because someone tasted them at a market now move because the description on the form does the work instead. She rewrote hers three times before people stopped asking the same question in every order.
- Local pickup beats shipping, for now. She's fielded requests from out of state but has stuck to a pickup radius she can drive herself, partly for freshness and partly because she's still figuring out packaging that survives a delivery truck.
The part she didn't expect
The order form also changed who she was hearing from. Farmers market customers were mostly regulars who already knew her name. The online list pulled in people two towns over who'd never been to a market at all, some of whom have since asked about a subscription. She hasn't built one yet. She's not sure the volume or the cave space supports it. But it's the first time in years she's had more demand than she knew what to do with, in the middle of the worst month her business has had.
If you're weighing a similar move, the Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting notes from members doing exactly this, low-tech and fast, and can connect you with a few who'd be glad to compare setups. We'd also like to hear your version, even if it's messier than hers was — especially if it's messier than hers was. This is the kind of adjustment our members are making on their own, ahead of any guidance we could have written for them, and we want the federation's picture of it to reflect what's actually happening on your bench and in your driveway, not a tidier story assembled after the fact.
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.