By JO DEE BLACK Tribune Staff Writer
Bozeman-based confectioner Robin Béquet, 43, isn't pacifying unemployment anxiety with the chewy sweets. Batches of her candy are inventory for Béquet Confections,http://www.bequetconfections.com/ the business she started a year and a half ago.
Her entrepreneurship was born of necessity. After riding the high-tech wave to its crest as the president of worldwide sales for Bozeman's ILX Lightwave, http://www.ilxlightwave.com Béquet also was there when the tech industry crashed. Eventually, she was laid off.
Without a job or prospects of another in her adopted hometown, Béquet started doing what she knows best - market research.
The work allowed her to define her customers and refine her product. Those assets, along with controlled spending, created a steady foundation from which to expand her business, Béquet says.
Today her all-natural gourmet caramels are sold in espresso bars, specialty grocery stores and upscale gift shops across the West.
"I'm originally from New York and I like fine things," Béquet said. "I like that I can create a product in Montana that people who shop in gourmet markets in California want."
Start in sales
After earning a bachelor's degree in biology from Stony Brook University in New York, Béquet spent 15 years in sales with W.L. Gore and Associates' medical products division in Flagstaff, Ariz.
When she and her husband moved to Bozeman, she joined ILX Lightwave. The company makes laser control equipment used in telecommunications.
During the three years Béquet spent at ILX, the employee pool grew from 64 to 300 and from six locations to 32. Béquet found herself opening new international offices for a company on the verge of going public.
But by 2001 the technology market was soft. Plans for an initial public offering of stock were pulled back and five rounds of layoffs took place. By the fall of 2001, Béquet was out of a job.
"I was sitting in my office the day I was laid off, unemployed in Bozeman with a degree in biology wondering what I was going to do," Béquet recalled.
Then a coworker walked in, announced she had venture capital to put up and wanted to go into business.
Béquet said the plan to sell caramels emerged only because she couldn't come up with a better product.
"I'm a firm believer bad ideas can lead to good ideas," she said. "I was hoping this would lead to a good idea."
Caramel plan sticks
It turns out the plan to sell caramels was a good idea all along.
The sweets are made from a recipe Béquet used for years.
"People seemed inordinately impressed with them," she said.
She set up blind taste tests using her caramels and four other brands of gourmet caramels. People were asked to rank their preferences and provide details on the choices they made.
"I was very surprised when 15 out of 16 people picked mine," Béquet said.
The test gave her confidence in her product's quality. Then she researched her customer base.
Béquet found her caramels fill an under-served niche in the gourmet candy market. She also learned that there are very few all-natural confections on the market.
"Big candy companies aren't making an attempt to move into the all-natural market," she said. "That means when I land an account, no one is coming in trying to sell against me."
Starting slow
Although Béquet was committed to starting a candy company, she wasn't willing to spend a lot of money up front.
"I wanted to test the market, learn what I didn't know and get definition about who my customers are before I started spending," she said.
There was plenty of elbow-grease invested, however.
Béquet secured a commercially licensed kitchen. Caramel was cut and wrapped by hand as the customer base developed.
"We wrapped more than 100,000 pieces by hand before we bought the equipment we have now that wraps 90 pieces a minute," she said.
Standard candy-making equipment was added, allowing her to make 20- to 30-pound batches of caramel at a time.
Investing slowly in a new company is a wise approach if possible, said Mark Shyne, a field engineer at the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center http://www.mtmanufacturingcenter.com/
Béquet turned to the center for help with research and planning.
"She did a good job of adding the right equipment at the right time at the right price," Shyne said. "She understood her customers and did all that market research up front before she went too crazy into production."
When Béquet was ready to add equipment, Shyne and his crew of graduate students from Montana State University-Bozeman helped her place it in the right sequence so production flows easily.
"When the equipment arrived we even helped her take off the door to move it in," he said.
Hitting the road
Béquet Confections recently contracted with a distributor to find shelf space for its products. Before that, however, it was Robin Béquet making the sales calls and staffing booths at trade shows.
"You have to know how to sell a product yourself before you can teach someone else to sell it," she said.
Béquet's learned that if a buyer tastes her product, the sale will close 80 percent of the time.
Long before she opened her own business, Béquet said she realized sales is her passion.
"For reasons I can't explain, it's what drives me," she said. "I like meeting people, dealing with customers."
Sales calls also helped Béquet figure out where her product sells best.
The caramels move well in high-traffic gift shops, such as the one at the Museum of the Rockies.
She doesn't sell the product to smaller gift shops, however, until the Christmas holiday season.
"Freshness is a big issue and they don't move fast enough in the smaller shops," she said. Because the caramels don't have preservatives, their shelf life is only six weeks.
"Understanding where the best market is is a real important issue," Béquet said.
C.M. Russell Museum Shop Acting Manager Pat Bryan said she appreciates Béquet's expertise.
Bryan tasted the caramels at a Billings trade show and then placed an order for pound-and-a-half sized bags when she got back to Great Falls.
"Robin called and said she thought smaller bags would move better in our shop, which they have," Bryan said.
Only a basketful of bags are left from the sizable order Bryan placed before the C.M. Russell Art Auction in March.
"She knows her product and how to sell it," Bryan said.
Flexibility a plus
With a distributor on board, Béquet's finding herself staying closer to home.
The flexibility of being her own boss is a plus to the mother of two girls, age 10 and 11.
She deliberately located her shop just a mile from the girls' school.
However, she said there are plenty of nights after dinner when she heads back down to the shop to put in a few more hours.
She's developed varieties of caramels. In addition to the original soft, there is now chewy and chocolate.
Béquet Confections has five part-time employees, including Béquet's father, Ray.
Just more than a year ago, Ray Béquet wrote his daughter from his home in New York, saying he was getting a little bored in retirement and was considering visiting Bozeman on an extended stay.
Béquet sent her father a box of caramels and told him that with her new venture, there'd be plenty to keep him busy.
"We ended up going on a vacation and when I returned there was a message on my answering machine from Dad saying he'd already booked a flight," Béquet said. "That was more than 15 months ago."
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