This episode is brought to you by Sendlane.   Connor Meakin, the Founder of Bluebird Provisions, thought his company would "crush it" sales-wise when the pandemic hit, but instead, business slowed to a trickle.   When there's an empty shelf of a food product, the food producer is often the last to know. There are so many uphill issues with wholesale and retail stories that upstart brands must cope with, Connor says.   In Part 2, Connor discusses:   * How a startup food producer's lack of resources can hurt retail sales. * The product's taste was the most challenging part of developing the dehydrated version of the product. * The importance of having good partners from a food science perspective. * How powdered products were easier to get into the U.S. market than liquid products. * The challenges of being a startup include being forced to change the company's name in 30 days.   Join Ramon Vela and Connor Meakin as they break down the inside story on The Story of a Brand.   For more on BlueBird Provisions, visit: https://bluebirdprovisions.co/    Subscribe and Listen to the podcast on all major apps. Simply search for “The Story of a Brand,” or click here to listen on your favorite podcast player: Listen now.   *   This episode is also brought to you by Sendlane.   If all DTC companies were forced to turn off Facebook ads, they'd be dead on arrival. Why is that?   They over-invest in paid acquisition and under-invest in retention.   Luckily, Sendlane makes it easy to solve this problem. Sendlane is an E-Commerce Customer Experience Platform helping hundreds of DTC brands to tighten their existing customer relationships.   Sendlane automates personalized customer experiences through Welcome and Abandoned Cart workflows, SMS, Deep Data Integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce, multi-store functionality, and much more.   Plus, they don't stand for lazy customer support. Their San-Diego-based team has an average 1-minute response time from a live human, making sure you never get stuck in a chat queue ever again.   Curious about how Sendlane can help your DTC brand grow? Schedule a demo with a Specialist. Visit https://www.sendlane.com/story