By David MacDonald T ommy, the readers would love to hear how a guy with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Atlanta College of Art who’s been responsible for mar- keting elements for movies like Nerd Prom and American Made Movie came to whipping-up batches of award-winning hot sauce. TW: In the early 2000s, I was playing in a rock band – I’ve been a musician since high school. We were playing out all the time and eating late night wings and one night I said I was going to make my own sauce. Everyone was like, ‘OK, whatever, Tommy’ but I just had this inclination: I’m not a big alcohol drinker, but I had this inclination that tequila would be good in hot sauce, like a wing sauce. I made it for the first time in 2002 and everybody loved it. Over time, I would just make 12 bottles or so and hand them out to friends for Christmas and things like that. Everyone kept coming to me and saying, ‘Man, can I get some more of that? You should bring it to market.’ So, after a few stops-and-starts we found a co-packer who is highly versed in the industry and she helped us figure out how to overcome our hiccups. We did our first batch in February of 2016 and we went from making 350 bottles in Tommy’s eclectic professional portfolio. His filmography, part of the “also” of Tommy’s artistic drive, includes an associate producer credit on the acclaimed documentary An Inconvenient Tax as well as the award- winning narrative feature film Grilling Bobby Hicks, which Tommy also co-wrote and directed. “With all that in mind,” he continued, “I’ve learned over the years that having too many irons on the fire is a bad thing. You can’t be a master of everything; you have to hone your focus. I’ve found a nice balance by assigning particular tasks to certain days in the week so that five things aren’t staring me in the face at once.” There is, we learned, one particular task for which Tommy is happy to extend his work week. For the last 16 years, Tommy has been refining his Bootlikker Hot Sauce, a tequila-based condiment with an origin story befitting a brand under the Terebinth Tree portfolio.
our first quarter to 350 bottles-a-month within the first year. Bootlikker is now in over 30 stores in the South East, on Amazon – and a couple other online retailers – so it’s defi- nitely growing. We recently hired a sales agent who’s trying to find us some even bigger opportunities. We like being in the specialty food stores and shops, department stores, and gift shops. It’s in the Savannah/Hilton Head Interna- tional Airport in a place called The Salt Table and they have a hard time keeping it in stock down there. People just see it as a Georgia-grown product, so it’s the perfect kind of gift for travellers. And we have different variations of our sauces with new flavors coming out also. Once we decided we were going to market we settled on the flask bottle to sort of echo the fact that there is alcohol in it – although it doesn’t taste like alcohol; it just has that margarita zip thing to it. I revamped the original label because I had this very utilitarian label on purpose because I wanted it to look almost apothe- cary-style in the beginning. Now the Bootlikker label looks more like something you would see on the back bar of a 1850s saloon. Your second place in the Hot Sauce-Medium category
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NOVEMBER 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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