The Very Early Years of Meadowbrooke Gourds (1993-1996)

 Meadowbrooke Gourds, believe it or not, is celebrating 30 years in business. I have been asked, since I am one of the founding members, to write up a small series of blogs to explain how this gourd crafting company got started. The early years were the learning years, the years of yeahs!, and oh nos! The years of trying to figure out how to work smarter and the years of learning from our mistakes. I hope you enjoy walking through time with me as I look back over the last 30 years and reminisce.

  So let me back up just a few steps and lay out the true beginning of our crazy little company. I first was introduced to gourd crafting in November of 1993, when our entire family gathered at Ben and Denise’s (Meadowbrooke’s founders and my sister and brother-in-law) house to celebrate our father’s birthday. Ben brought out the very first gourds he had handcrafted in the garage of his home to get our input. Ben had always been a farmer by trade but also did carpentry work in the winter. I still wonder whatever made him look at a dried gourd and decide to use his wood working tools on them to come up with, at the beginning, very simple designs on them. One thing I do know about Ben is that his mind rarely shuts off and he is always working on the next idea or how to do things easier. He took what input we had and along with Denise’s help continued to work on different designs.

  In 1994, he began sending his gourd designs along to wholesale shows with a local company that sold dried flowers to see if there was any interest from other shop owners in carrying his gourd designs in their stores. Some of the first gourds taken were jack-o-lantern baskets that did not even sit straight without putting a rock in the bottom, but store owners loved them because they were unique, and they were always looking for the things that no one else had in their area (Note: he figured out how to make them sit flat quickly once they started selling). In the summer of 1994, Ben and Denise approached me about quitting my job at the time and coming to work for them as they wanted to open this new business but needed some additional help. I was a little skeptical, but they invited me to go along to one of the wholesale shows in Hartford, CT for a weekend and after that show I was sold.  I gave my notice and in January of 1995, I started working for the new Meadowbrooke Gourds.

 

  What a learning experience. In 1995, we were a crew of five and had around 20 products. We worked out of tractor trailers and a pole building on a farm in Mechanicsburg, PA and we washed all our gourds outside. Ben grew all our gourds that we used. Denise answered the phone calls from her home where she was staying at home with 3 children under the age of 9, the youngest being around 5 months old. Ben also took this time to teach two of his loyal farm crew members, Khamsene and Shawn, to hand cut the gourd designs and dye the gourds. I was hired to do the bookkeeping and help anywhere I was needed. At that time, we all pitched in wherever we were needed. We were young people working for a young company and we learned to do a little bit of everything. We worked long hours, made lots of mistakes, learned ways to make things easier, went to new wholesale shows, wowed new stores finding us for the first time but most importantly, figured out how to work together as a team and exceeded our goals and expectations for the first year. We also realized that the setup at the Mechanicsburg farm we were working on was not going to make it another year. We had outgrown it very quickly in one year.

  At the end of 1995, we went on our very first company vacation to Santa Barbara, CA to meet up with Ben’s brother who helped us lay out a business plan and come up with our company constitution which is still followed today. 

 

  In 1996, Ben and Denise bought a 200-acre farm on the west side of Carlisle from his parents that already had existing buildings on it that we could move into to start our next chapter. We moved everything up to the new farm and made ourselves at home. Was it perfect, heck no, but it was better and that was what we were looking for. We had a lot more area to spread out and could craft more gourds and store them. We continued to go to shows mostly on the east coast and sold strictly wholesale. Ben started to make some improvements to the building and to the farm that helped us continue to grow and we started to hire a few more people to help keep up with the orders. 

 

TO BE CONTINUED…..

 

Written by Dori Heller