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Hi.  I’m Eric.  I’m one of the marketing interns here at Sweet Leaf Tea.

As I reflect on my experience and our efforts during South By Southwest, I can only think of one word to describe it: mind-blowing. Ok, two words. This was my first ever SXSW, and it was a great way to start by marketing for Sweet Leaf Tea. With around 1900 bands and thousands in attendance, SXSW 2009 was a huge success. Although it was an entire week of free music, food, drinks, shows, and other festivities, it seems as though it went by too fast. I was fortunate enough to be in Austin all week to participate and market our product on the streets throughout the festival.

If you attended SXSW this year, there is a pretty darn good chance you saw us there. If you attended one of our 33 parties, you were probably drinking Sweet Leaf and/or some form of scrumtralescent Sweet Leaf cocktail. Believe, me, I was. If you found yourself on Soco, the Fader Fort, Auditorium Shores, 6^th Street or just downtown during the hours of 10 p.m. – 1 a.m., there’s a pretty good chance you saw us too. If you came to SXSW and didn’t see a single Sweet Leaf bottle or logo, well I just feel sorry for you for missing out. As Austin’s own organic tea company, we like to think we were the unofficial but legit beverage sponsor of SXSW.

We were lucky enough to market a product that basically sold itself solely by its delicious taste. It was rare to encounter someone who didn’t want some of the free homemade granny goodness that we were dealing. During our eight days of blitzing, guerilla marketing, and free tea slinging, we gave away roughly FIVE THOUSAND BOTTLES!  If that’s not a lot of free tea I don’t know what is. Those 5,000 do NOT even include all the tea we supplied at our 33 co-sponsored parties. If you think that I’d be sick of drinking Sweet Leaf Tea by now, then you, my friend, are very false.

South By Southwest 2009 was a huge success for us, and it will only get better from here. A wise man once wrote, “There were about 150,000 SXSW attendees, and we rocked 50,000. So you basically had a one in three chance of running into Sweet Leaf Tea” (Mercado, Happy. 485). The only real let down during SXSW were our defective Sweet Leaf Vespas. Bossman Happy tried tirelessly to get them working, but it was out of his control. The imported Vespas were crap, to say the least, and needed new engines. However, we did get one good day of blitzing out of one before the engine finally failed at the Fader Fort, leaving Happy stranded. Luckily he had us glorious interns at his disposal to rescue him in the van so we could continue providing SXSWers with free tea.

And last but not least is the highlight of my SXSW experience. I am of course speaking about the nightly drives downtown with the mobile gobos, which projected our logo on just about every building downtown. Just when you thought you could escape us at night, there we were, swangin’ and slangin’ that tea. Happy and the marketing team came up with the idea to rig two powerful gobo/leko lights on a moving vehicle so we could project our logo downtown during South By, and left me with the responsibility of fulfilling his dream. Well, we did it, and if you saw our logo downtown then we succeeded. As I drove around, I was never surprised to see hundreds of drunks in awe at our moving logo, so I just smiled and gave out as much tea as I could.

To top it all off, our big party with Do512 came Saturday and brought SXSW to a glorious close. After a long week of work, I finally had the chance to enjoy some free shows and taste my very first Mint and Honey cocktail, and it changed my life forever. Seriously, it did.

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