After graduating from UC Berkeley, Adam Guthrie realized that he would not be happy with his career working for someone else. “Since I had some bartending experience (mostly as my fraternity’s social chair for a couple of semesters), I decided that retailing bar supplies for the at-home enthusiast was an underserved niche that I had the potential to take advantage of. After visiting a variety of discussion boards frequented by other storefront owners, and doing some research on my

own, I concluded that the Volusion platform would suit my needs best due to its professional appearance, flexibility, and automation features.”

Adam started off by listing his products on higher traffic sites while his search engine rankings were being built. “In the early stages of HomeBarSource.com’s launch, we relied solely upon price comparison sites such as Shopzilla, Froogle, and Shopping.com to provide leads to potential customers. Within a few months, the major search engines began to provide the website’s pages with higher page ranks in the search results due to the SEO capabilities of the Volusion platform. As revenue increased, we began to purchase ad-space and links to our store on high ranking websites, which within a few more months helped HomeBarSource.com reach top-10 (and in some cases, top-3) rankings for our major targeted keywords. We’ve also added a Drink Recipe informational section on our website, which has helped our site become indexed for even more related keywords and to increase our page rank due to an increase in the text:code ratio.”

Adam’s had so much success with homebarsource.com, he decided to open another store using Volusion’s platform, kitchenandrestaurant.com. Adam is optimistic about his new prospect. “While the sales and product line of HomeBarSource.com continue to increase, Kitchen and Restaurant appears to be gaining enough momentum to indicate the potential for an even greater success than our first venture.”

Michelle Greer
michelle_greer(at)volusion.com
http://www.volusion.com

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Although the two took their first scuba lesson by accident, Phil Ellis and his son Brad quickly fell in love with scuba diving. “As soon as I went underwater for the first time, I was hooked. Both Brad and I began immediately thinking how we might make a living doing that great sport,” said Phil. After becoming a more active diver, he decided to quit his job in industrial quality improvement and manufacturing process control to open a scuba shop in Decatur, Alabama. When the travel industry came near to a dead halt after

September 11th, their brick-and-mortar store ended up not fairing so well.

Rather than just close up shop, Phil decided to take his business online with Dive Sports. He and his son had some success with a website they had built from scratch in 2002. After experiencing some growth, they soon realized they needed something more robust to maintain a sustainable business model. A friend had recommended Volusion and they set up the live store in January 2008.

Since opening their Volusion store, Phil and the crew at Dive Sports has since reached out to the online community in scuba forums, chat boards, and blogs. Phil even started his own blog to discuss scuba products and tips. By reaching out to the community online, Phil developed an edge over his bigger, less personable competitors. “No matter how much our internet business grows, we are still just a bunch of scuba divers that love the sport and love sharing our knowledge and information with our customers. We like for our customers to think of us as their local scuba store, no matter where they live,” says Phil.

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James “El Tigre” Booker felt robbed back in 2001 when his four putt putt wins in one year was dubbed “the Booker Slam” rather than a Grand Slam. “It shouldn’t matter that they weren’t all in the same calendar year. I held all four titles at once. That should count for something,” he said then.

Tigre faces an uphill battle, as he has not proven as dominant as in previous years. Some speculate that his putt putt skills have declined since leaving his first coach and marrying his bikini model/nanny girlfriend. Some say he’s lost his swing. Tigre vehemently denies anything of the sort.

Booker decided that 2008 would be the year to prove his critics wrong. However, after the first day of the Volusion Masters, Booker’s name is nowhere on the leader board. “I just lost my concentration. Tomorrow is another day.” At one point, geek/marketing ninja Michelle Greer took a picture of the golfer in midswing. The incident triggered an outburst by Tigre, who demanded that Greer be escorted out of the tournament.

“He’s been doing this crap for years. If I let it get to me, I wouldn’t be doing my job,” she said.

Will Tigre come up with one of his legendary comebacks this weekend? We shall see. Check out/comment on Day One’s highlights on Flickr.

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Brooks Lambert didn’t come up with a great idea for a website by putting together a focus group or scouring through Google keyword searches. He didn’t pour through marketing documents for nights on end or pay to go to retail conference after conference. When Brooks came up with the concept for www.thebeerbelly.com, he and his buddy Ted were hanging in his backyard reminiscing about sneaking beer into ballgames and movies. “Both of us have been in the product development industry for years and one thing lead to another…

just like one beer leads to another, and before we knew it, we had cut up one of my $300+ wetsuits used for surfing and stuffed a CamelBAK bladder in the front and were cracking up at how funny it was, and called it ‘The Beerbelly’, of course.”

Developing a great product is one thing. Putting it on the web and marketing it is something else entirely. “Being a wanna be geek and knowing enough to be dangerous… I thought, how hard can it be? We designed a website, thinking it would be ‘easy’ to add the e-commerce/shopping cart capabilities… that was our first big lesson. It’s NOT easy… especially if you choose the wrong tools. After stumbling around a bit, we finally found Volusion… and things fell into place.”

Although Brooks and the Beerbelly gang do what they can to make the website as usable and search engine friendly as possible, they have gotten exposure in very serendipitous ways, including some press in Sports Illustrated. “This has been the most amazing ride for us as far as the press goes. We have done very little proactive press activity. We have sent a few press releases out… but mainly from the web, we have been “discovered” by a few key news sources which have led to others etc. The Sports Illustrated story was one of the few that we actually had a ‘hand in.’ My wife, Lisa is a HUGE Rick Reilly fan… I read that he was going to be speaking at our local bookshop about one of his new books and told her she should go… She said she didn’t feel like it, but I told her she should go and give Rick a Beerbelly… I guess that made it OK to leave me at home… She waited to get an autographed copy of his book and told him that she had a gift for him. He said that was a first… She gave him The Beerbelly and he said he had been wanting to get one. She told him she was the wife of the inventor and he told her to get my ‘a**’ on the phone and get me down there because he had to meet the guy that came up with such a crazy, great idea. Of course I jumped in the car, had a great time hanging out with the legendary Rick Reilly. We all know what happened after that…”

What are Brooks’s plans for his Beerbelly and his new product, the Wine Rack, for the future? “Great question… I ask myself that question almost daily. To be honest we are actually considering selling the product lines at this point. We have had multiple expressions of interest in the last couple of weeks that we are currently consulting with our attorneys as to the best way to explore this option… If there are any interested parties… please feel free to contact me directly.”

Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
michelle_greer(at)volusion.com
http:/www.volusion.com

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Have you bought an Obama t-shirt or bumper sticker? If so, you’ve been to store.barackobama.com, the official Barack Obama store. The Obama camp hired Tigereye Designs to set up their shopping cart with Volusion’s eCommerce software. The presidential hopeful raised $32 million in January alone, a record for any candidate ever in a presidential primary. According to what Obama fundraisers told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, 88 percent of this was raised online through this store and Obama’s official website.

How has the Obama camp prepared for Super Tuesday? The Obama store offers specific t-shirts for each state holding a primary on Super Tuesday. If supporters are not in these states, the store also offers an array of shirts for men, women, and infants.

Want to learn more about Super Tuesday? Check out Wikipedia’s entry on the topic, or you can read and even submit your own Super Tuesday news on nowpublic.com.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

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