Pizza Tonight at SOTJ (photo from rvanews.com)

Our second farmer’s market season is well underway, and we’re enjoying being back at the South of the James! In an effort to help us stream-line our pizza production, we decided not to carry our retail line at the market. Overall, lines are shorter and people seem to be happy with the change.

However, there are some diehard pizza people who were less than pleased with our new arrangement, and in an effort to make everyone happy, we’ve come up with the following:

Also, this weekend at the market, we’ll have a few coupons available for first-time Relayfoods.com customers. You can find our entire line of products on Relay 7 days a week – They’ll even bring it right to your door. The coupons are for 40% off your first 3 orders and will definitely go fast!

If you forget to preorder, don’t fret: We always have plenty of fresh dough for sale, and you can find the rest of our line at Ellwood Thompson’s and Farm to Family.

Last summer when our friend and coworker Kevin mentioned a little website called Kickstarter.com, we were quite intrigued.  He described a site on which businesses and individuals could seek funding for an idea or project from donors both locally and from across the vast world of the internet.

Project creators set their own parameters and decide their own rewards for backers.  Rewards can range from shout-outs to screen prints to, in our case, entire catered events – whatever the project creator deems worthy of a certain level of ‘investment.’

A very brisk first year of business kept us from spending too much more time on developing our own kickstarter campaign.  We sat back and watched as the site grew in popularity, picking up national media coverage along the way.

Last week, we finally launched our own project on Kickstarter, which you can see HERE. Backer rewards range from oven-fired pizzas, to pizza packets, to a lovely Pizza Tonight t-shirt. Our biggest pledge reward is a catered event with our mobile oven!

We have been absolutely blown away by the display of support from people locally and across the country. It is very inspiring to see so many people who ‘get it.’

Not everybody gets the kickstarter bug, however. We’ve definitely been approached by a few people who feel like kickstarter is just a way of circumventing traditional lending options like banks or other microlendors.

To them, I would say, IT IS! It’s a way for businesses to take back the funding and allow people to determine the worth of a project, not faceless banks and corporations. Instead of paying back The Man, we get to pay back The People, and that’s always a good thing.

We’ve already learned so much from one week of kickstarting – mostly about the generosity of people who believe in a good idea, and we’re thrilled to see how it develops from here!