The Sawyer Creek Foal Cam Success
Oh my...where do I start...well, it all started
with my son's idea of building us a web page, which blossomed and expanded
until we had a live foal cam. From the live foal cam and message board we built
a huge world wide following, from England, Australia, New Zealand...literally
every corner of the earth and all parts of the US.
We had 12 foals born on our live cam...not only was this fantastic for us
because of the audience we sold many foals before they were even born but
fantastic for the viewers who enjoyed the births. Two newpapers even did quite
nice feature articles on us and our unique marketing approach of the live foal
cam. They built up quite a little club calling themselves "Creekies"
after the name of our farm Sawyer Creek. To date we have over 420,000 hits from
which my server says over 200,000 are unique! Then even after the foals were
born, they continued to watch and participate on the message board site...which
they still do! Check it out at
www.sawyercreek.com on
any day. The message board gets over 100 messages! Some days 300!
Anyway, several suggested they would like to meet us and the foals that they
saw born in person and that an organized date would be in order to save us the
constant weekends of visitors (which I must say we get anyway). So...what
started out as a simple weekend barbecue grew and grew until soon we had a full
blown horsey woodstock!
We hired a live classic rock style band, had a team of Belgians give wagon
rides down our country road, had a 300 pound pig roast, an 80 pound beef
quarter, 3 deep fried turkeys, 160 hot dogs and beer butt chicken! We had a
bonfire in the evening to top it off. Well, what we originally thought was
going to be maybe 20 people kept growing and growing and so did the enthusiasm.
Two women came from the United Kingdom...one even wrote the Her Royal Highness
(The Queen of England) who is big horse enthusiast and sent her one of the
newspaper articles! She dictated a letter back through her Lady in Waiting! We
had several fly in from California which is quite the cross country trip. We
had an 87 year old woman and her daughter come in from Louisiana making Ja
mbalaya in her hotel room to share with all! Complete with crawdads! They came
from Florida, Virginia, Illinois...so many states I can't even remember. Our
turn out was around 300 but could have been more as there were so many and too
hard to count.
Our farm was crammed with people...some were Appaloosa people, some were
prospective Appaloosa people, and some were Appaloosa people by the time they
left! It was a great time held by all and a nicer group of people you could not
have met. I guess the moral to the story is, that even a smaller breeder like
ourselves can make a big impact if you try!
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