This weekend was a great one for Velvet Cloud media coverage and gave us all a moral boost here on the farm. On Saturday we featured on RTE’s radio programme Country Wide. This was a recording from when John Cooke the presenter came to visit, and met the sheep, saw how we produced our Velvet Cloud sheep’s yogurt and our Rockfield sheep’s cheese. John was such a professional that we didn’t feel at all nervous and the whole thing sounded like a normal visit by a friend might sound like. You can listen back here if you would like. https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/#/radio1/21858760
Immediately after the programme, visits to our website exploded, and then the sales started to come in, so it was a great boost in these challenging times. Then later that day we opened the Irish Times Weekend magazine and saw that famed chef JP McMahon of Michelin star restaurant Aniar, and Food On The Edge fame, recommended using Rockfield Sheep’s cheese on his fab risotto recipe, and in the same publication, in her review of Allta’s take away offering, Corinna Hargrave mentioned us again, as our Rockfield sheep’s cheese was used in a pasta dish.
Later on Sunday evening on Instagram, a very kind influencer who believes in supporting small Irish businesses “Superstylesaby” was making a beef stroganoff and recommended substituting the sour cream in the dish, with Velvet Cloud sheep's yogurt instead. As soon as that Instagram story went up we saw our followers increase like mad. Slightly harder to measure if this resulted in direct sales, but one or two paying customers I have been in touch with said this is where they had seen it , and all of this is certainly doing a lot for brand awareness.
