Making the most of our weekly trip to Burlington

About once a week we head into Burlington to meet with our creative team (Dave and Steve at Place, above), do some market research or customer development, have lunch with an investor, stock up on groceries at City Market or Healthy Living, etc.

Often, if we have enough time, we'll try to hit one of our favorite places for a bite to eat (or a cold beer!): Stone Soup, Open Arms Cafe or American Flatbread. Sometimes, in the summer, we'll even get in a walk or run at Shelburne Farms, one of our favorite places anywhere.

On today's weekly visit to BTV we kicked off Round 2 of our creative work with Place (Round 1 centered on logo development). Now the focus turns to how we bring our brand to life in a powerful, authentic manner out in the 'marketplace' (packaging, merchandising, web site, collateral, etc).

It's exciting to finally be exploring a "visual vocabulary" for our brand in earnest and we'll be sure to share the highlights here. Hopefully some of you will weigh in as we go!

After our session at Place, we dipped into Healthy Living and EMS as part of our 'customer development' effort. The idea here is to talking to customers to introduce Ursa Major (well before we launch), learn more about the market, get feedback on what we're doing, test our key assumptions, etc.

We've now hit about 10 stores in the local area over the past week and we're encouraged by the response we're getting from local retailers. There seems to be interest in a natural, sustainable personal care brand for people who love the outdoors (oh, by the way, that's a riff on our updated mission!).