Today we’d like to introduce you to Gina Johnson.
Gina, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I never knew that one day, my career would culminate into my passion, food: especially in gourmet popcorn and treats! I was in the corporate world my whole adult life, mostly in sales and marketing, supporting sales teams all over the country. I’m not much of a risk-taker, but when the previous owner reached out to me to see if I was interested in taking over his store, I was so ready! It’s such a cool story. Approximately two years before purchasing the store, my (grown) son was at my house for family dinner on a Sunday evening. He wanted me to try a kettle recipe he found online. From there, we started experimenting with more sugar, flavors, colors, and chocolates. I started building a little business by word of mouth. As my home cottage food business grew, so did the mounting responsibilities at my corporate job. For financial reasons, this forced me to choose my job at the time over making popcorn. It was time to let a tiny ad I placed a year before in my church bulletin expire.
Fast forward two weeks. I was in Phoenix on a business trip when I received an email from the previous owner of the store explaining he was selling his business to retire. He contacted me after one of his employees showed him my ad in the church bulletin and exclaimed that he had competition in the area! After some quick due diligence, I took a chance on my passion and left the corporate world behind. The rest is history!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road. Some of the struggles were a year and a half into owning the store when we experienced a pandemic and knew that the business was built on foot traffic, which had practically come to a halt. When I bought the store, my intention was to slowly grow it through different revenue streams, but I was forced to speed that up when the pandemic hit. Luckily, with hard work, some sacrifice, and dedication, I was able to recover quickly without a huge financial loss.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about POParella’s Gourmet POPcorn & Treats!?
We’re known for our 60+ flavors of gourmet popcorn and a variety of vintage candy. What people don’t know about us is that we also make lots of treats in-house such as fudge, cookies, cotton candy, and other various homemade treats. We also make customizable popcorn flavors and colors. We have a large variety of gift basket options and tins galore! Our sports team tins are among the most popular. We LOVE working with our customers and want to help them as much as we can with any special and custom requests.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
Covid-19 almost put us out of business. We obviously weren’t expecting it to go as long as it has. Because we follow most restaurant guidelines, we had to quickly become a curbside delivery business for our foot traffic customers. It became apparent that we needed to quickly pivot and expand our clientele base to other revenue streams to include corporations, churches, schools, and other organizations. The biggest lesson we learned was that the digital and social media platforms have a big impact on a large population of local customers. We had to speed up our process of educating ourselves on how to market and advertise on those platforms in order to be successful.
Contact Info:
- Email: gina@POParellas.com
- Website: www.POParellas.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poparellaspopcorn
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PoparellasGourmetPopcorn
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/POParellas
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/poparellas-gourmet-popcorn-and-treats-frisco-3
