Stardom is not altogether new to Colleen Dyck, owner of the Great GORP Project in Niverville. She’s already received four regional and national awards and has been featured in numerous magazines since she began her energy bar business ten years ago.
This February, Dyck packed up her GORP bars and set out to do some stargazing of her own. The kind of stars you’ll find in Hollywood for the annual Academy Awards.
“[Our goal was] to get good media attention, to have a neat story to tell, and to do a press release and have some fun,” says Dyck. “It kind of helps when you can say stuff like this [in] your marketing material. It elevates your brand a little bit and speaks to the quality of it.”
The idea began with her friend and associate in the wholesome food business, Peter Fehr of Gourmet Inspirations. Together, they sent samples of their products to the coordinators of the Academy Award gifting department and kept their fingers crossed. Both were accepted, thus beginning a race to organize their booths for the stars gifting suite.
The gifting suite, in Hollywood terms, is where hundreds of attendees to the awards can pick up complimentary samples of products offered by a broad variety of vendors from across North America. To participate, a vendor must have an elegant display and each gift package must hold a specific value.
In an effort to impress, Dyck ordered packaging befitting the stars: specially designed boxes with the capacity to hold one of each of her energy bar flavours. The boxes arrived just in time and Dyck enlisted family and employees to assemble the packages. Dyck arranged to ship them to the Biltmore Hotel, home of the gifting suite, and booked flights for herself and her husband Grant.
It was evident from the get-go that this adventure was about to get a little wild. A last-minute phone call before leaving brought bad news: the shipping company would not be able to fulfill their obligation to deliver the product in time. Just hours before their flight, Dyck made numerous phone calls to UPS and was promised ground delivery on time. Recognizing the precarious nature of shipping products across country, Dyck stuffed a suitcase full of GORP bars just in case. If all else failed, each attendee would at least get one bar.
Though the couple’s flight arrived in L.A. as expected, their luggage did not. Missing was their entire trade show booth, Dyck’s backup product, and all of their clothing. At about the same time, Dyck discovered that her entire UPS shipment of bars was being detained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Louisiana.
With only hours to presentation time, Dyck had nothing.
The luggage finally arrived and, after hours of phone calls, the couple managed to negotiate a release of their product from the FDA. But with the delay, UPS could no longer promise on-time delivery.
A chance meeting with an employee in the service department of the Biltmore Hotel proved to be their salvation. The employee, an ex-UPS driver, made some calls on their behalf, making a deal to reroute the product for faster delivery.
According to Dyck, the product arrived at their display booth with only seconds to spare. The celebrities were already rolling in. For the first time since the adventure began, Dyck was able to relax and enjoy meeting and greeting hundreds of movie personalities.
“I was struck by how real and authentic and kind everyone was,” Dyck acknowledges. “I was expecting a lot more of the stereotypical attitude that we often think celebrities have. It was such a good reminder. We can be so bamboozled by the media, and you have these conceptions that you don’t even realize are there. Overwhelmingly, people were just wonderful.”
The star-struck couple returned home to find that their website was receiving more traffic than ever.
“We had a good response,” says Dyck. “The hotel actually just ordered bars for their staff because they liked them so much.”
As for where to go from here, Dyck says the sky’s the limit. The Academy Awards event was, in part, a kickoff to GORP’s big break into the U.S. market. She plans on eventually seeing her energy bars go global.
“We’re kind of at the edge of the cliff and I’m choosing to go forward and hopefully I can do it,” Dyck says. “I want to grow as big as I can. It’s not for the money, but it’s for what the money can do. It’s a tool. The more profitable you are, the more you can give, the more you can affect, the more jobs you can provide. All of those things excite me.”
But even with dreams this big, Dyck has no intention of relocating her growing business.
“I want to keep it in Niverville. I want to create something that Niverville is proud of. [Here], I’ve got access to wonderful people right in my own backyard.”
