Caleb Musser started Musser & Company not to build and sell unique, crafty boxes, but to provide relationship cultivating services through personalized gifts. But how did he go from a printer salesman to an entrepreneur? After struggling to make inroads selling door to door and making cold calls resulting in continuous rejection, he was brainstorming with a friend over coffee. He thought aloud, “what if we bought old cigar boxes and sent letters inside them?” The receptionist thinks it’s a generous gift of cigars, and it’s an attention-grabbing and “outside the box” way to deliver a letter. After a few deliveries of people responding very favorably to his creativeness he thought that there “might be something more to this than designing a tangible message.”
In 2014 and no longer selling printers, Caleb joined a local NASCAR team as their Director of Business Development. There, the team’s engineers allowed him to use their workshop to build boxes. He would not only build and customize the boxes for prospective sponsors, but he also would provide an experience within the box. It was at the end of that year that he decided to start Musser & Company (originally Southern Favor) by himself.
“After, paying bills and rent, I realized I had only around $600 in my bank account. So I went for broke.” Caleb spent almost all of that money making samples. It was all or nothing. He made 40 different boxes for companies in town.
“I had previously made a list of all the CEOs in Charlotte that I wanted to meet in the area.” Naïve – he knows. But he was persistent enough to land a meeting with an executive at Coke Consolidated in South Park.
Caleb’s goal was to meet briefly with that executive. He also wanted to leave an impression, so he built a customized box for his contact at Coke. “The day of my meeting, within the Coke facility, I lost my security pass, but I only realized this while inside the elevator.” Unfortunately, the elevator doors had closed and it was already heading upwards. As an elevator hostage, he found himself heading to the sixth floor – the executive suites.
When the doors opened, any executive could have been standing on the other side. But to his surprise, it was the man whose name was etched on the box in Caleb’s hands. A few weeks later, he received a phone call from that same executive expressing how his messaging was cool and creative.
That call led to Musser & Company’s first order, which just happened to pay the same day that he ran out of money.
Since then, Musser & Company’s boxes have helped to strengthen relationships for the New York Mets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Falcons, Auburn University and more, including our own Charlotte Hornets. The largest order was for the 2016 Super Bowl where Musser & Company created gifts for all of the NFL owners.
“The way we’re building Musser & Company is to be this hybrid creative agency and manufacturing company. The goal is for the clients to want to work with us for the ideas and we might create the gift, we might create an experience, so we send the client a box with a dream getaway.”
Obviously, this has been successful for the professional sports segment. But he’s noticed a really big opportunity to sell boxes straight to consumers for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, mother’s day, father’s day, and other holidays. He’s doing so through Musser & Company’s original brand – Southern Favor. But not without challenges.
“I thought – we’ve done all this cool stuff for NFL owners, a US president, and more — that people were going to buy these things.” But for Caleb, it’s been a very humbling experience and is forcing him to learn a different style of advertising and standing up a new sales channel. The Southern Favor tagline is “Give the gift they can’t buy for themselves, designed by you and your memories.”
His dream is to disrupt both the agency market and the product market. “What I saw in other sales roles was that there are idea companies and widget makers. I want Musser & Company to be in the middle.”
He sees it as a relationship intelligence agency that specializes in capturing the things that make a person tick and finds creative ways to capture attention and build relationships.
His advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is to first, look for problems. Constantly ask “why” and to keep a list of all of your ideas – even the crazy ones. “Even two wild unrelated ideas could create a decent opportunity.”
