The question I am often asked is where did you get the name Tassi? We actually spent a long time trying to come up with just the right name—it seemed like every name we thought of was taken. Finally we just kind of made up a name—we had heard Tassi as a first name, last name and, of course, pecan tassies. Later, we learned that a form of the word Tassi in old or middle French means “little pocket or little pouch.” IT WAS PERFECT!

Thanks to Pete Jones of See Monster Design for the great logo!

We are going to be on QVC. This will be a great way to get the word out quickly about Tassi to a large number of women. One of the biggest challenges is to help women understand what the Tassi is and how it works. Being on QVC will give me a chance to demonstrate and explain the Tassi on TV for 8 minutes. I know that word of mouth is our best marketing tool. So the sooner we can get Tassies into the hands of women the better.

QVC required special tags and labeling and wanted the Tassies in their Virginia warehouse in three weeks. This gave us a couple weeks to get the work done before they needed to be shipped.

After doing some checking, we figured a fulfillment company would charge $8,000 – $10,000 to do the work. So we decided to do it ourselves.

This meant we had to bring the Tassi master cartons into our kitchen from the garage (we were still storing them in the garage at that time), cut them open, remove the four inner cartons (which takes a lot of shaking), cut open the inner cartons, empty them on the table, open each Tassi package, attach special tags, reseal the package, put two Tassies in a polybag, seal the bag, put on QVC bar codes, put the bags in inner cartons, put a sticker on the inner carton, put four inner cartons in a master carton and then attach QVC labels to each master carton. And we had to do this for thousands of Tassies.

We spread the word to friends and neighbors we thought would be willing to help and wouldn’t mind making a little extra money for Christmas.

We started on a Friday. I worked with three or four other people in my kitchen for five hours. We finished 450 Tassies. At that rate, it would take another 80 hours to finish all of the Tassies with five or six people working on them. I was feeling overwhelmed. Because of other commitments, including going back to QVC for a required training course, it seemed like an impossible task.

The next day (Saturday), we started at 7 a.m. with a small crew, but our numbers grew as the day went on. At one point, we had 22 people working on the Tassies. They were amazing. We worked until midnight and finished 7,200 Tassies in one day. We really felt like it was a miracle. Needless to say, we were able to finish the work and send them to QVC on time.

Left: Here is a picture of our Tassi crew at work in my kitchen on that long Saturday.

Thank you for visiting the new Tassi website.

Watch this space because I’ll be posting my blog entries very soon.

Here’s just some the great new features on our website…

• Tassi Talk: See for yourself how the Tassi has helped others and share your own happy stories
• Tell A Friend: Let your friends know that you were just thinking of them…and their hair
• Tassi News: Catch us at upcoming events!
• Tale of the Tassi: Read how it all began

And there’s more. Please explore and enjoy.

Thanks for stopping by!

– Shawna