For those who have not been in the family forever, I thought I would elaborate on the meaning of WinterCoolies. It's a term that I'm sure you've all heard us use time to time, but may not know the origins from which it was coined.
As you are all aware, our father is a visionary man. Among my favorite investment ideas are: pig farming in Micronesia, pig farming in Hooper, Great Dane breeding, claiming our home as a farm property for the tax advantages. One of the first times that I found myself thinking, "that's crazy enough that it just might work" was the idea of owning a mobile snow cone stand. As I recall, we would start out small, working the local founder's day before we went mainstream--adding cotton candy and soft serve ice cream as the business started to build up steam. I neglect to mention the work force of this operation was the 10 to 5 year old children of our family. It truly was a brilliant idea, after all, who could resist a group of orphaned looking children with several hundred pounds of equipment in a red wagon--the youngest carrying the generator?
Of course to make this a sustainable idea we would need to re-market every winter as a hot chocolate stand.
Now every good idea needs a good title: something that rolls off the tongue, but sticks in the mind. I mean really, would you ever buy a hot pocket if it was called "cheap-microwavable-bread-with-food-inside?" So it was decided that with a company name of WinterCoolies, we couldn't lose.
To shorten the story, although the mobile snack stand never came to fruition, the name never left our hearts. I believe that the name has lingered around these many years because it truly is a great product name that has embedded in our minds deeper every time it rolled off our tongues, and secondly, deep down we all believe that this idea really could have worked.
And soon thereafter we put the name to an actual product the day we tried to make hot chocolate. We did not know how much 4 quarts were so we doubled it. Turns out the hot chocolate was really gross. But instead of give up we froze it in individual cups and called it witercooloes! Turns out they were gross too, but not gross enough for the little girls who were very young and would eat anything frozen and brown.
ReplyDeleteSo, so funny! Thanks for the chuckle Rob and Brad.
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone. This is already great. Just to clarify I am not the one Winter with visions of grandure. It seems some of my children on there own sold Rock to the neighbors and our of pity the neighbors actually bought them.
ReplyDelete