Chapter 8
What Could Be More Inspiring Than Enthusiastic Customers?

If you’ve never heard of the EGG^®, it only means that none of your friends, relatives, or neighbors own one. Eggheads are tireless promoters who tell anyone and everyone that the ceramic cooker, derived from an ancient Oriental design, is the best possible way to prepare anything from steaks, fish, and hamburgers to slow-roasted brisket, smoked meats, cornbread, or even a cherry pie. In fact, the Egg also stands as a monument to Ed Fisher’s persistence as well as his mastery of two arts: not just designing a cooker, but also persuading his customers to engage everyone they know to buy Eggs of their own. This kind of engagement is painstaking work and often slow; but for the right product, it’s magic.

Starting in 1974, Fisher’s dogged persistence led him to build a customer list for his Big Green Egg Company (BGE) one satisfied person at a time. At first, he demonstrated his evolving product to folks who stopped in at his retail store in Atlanta; later he began giving samples to potential distributors he met at trade shows and industry meetings. Almost everyone who sampled the cooking succumbed to Fisher’s charms—or, rather, to the charms of his endearingly oddball cooker. The result was a constantly expanding flock of Eggheads who, after they tried it, couldn’t seem to stop crowing about the succulence of the food it produced, attracting additional acolytes to the congregation of Egg worshippers.

Along the way, Fisher tinkered with his cooker until he had a product that was ready for national distribution—but even then, he didn’t trust mass marketers with his hatchling. Only carefully selected specialty retailers capable of educating customers in using and caring for Fisher’s peculiar contraption were allowed to handle his precious Egg.

You might have missed the 2008 EGGtoberfest, but it’s not too late to get to the next EGGtoberfest. Just go to www.biggreenegg.com to see a video about the EGGsperience.

Who—other than Fisher himself—could have guessed that an odd-looking product with an equally offbeat marketing strategy would turn into a growth company extraordinaire? But the privately held BGE has done just that. Its double-digit sales growth has doubled so many times over the years that BGE now owns the kamado cooking market, describing itself on Biggreenegg.com as “the world’s largest producer and international distributor” of the ceramic cookers. Fisher says that sales in 2008 are expected to again surpass record 2007 sales to attain yet another milestone.

A Miracle with Flaws

The Big Green Egg story begins in Japan, where a visiting Fisher first sampled food prepared in the kamado style of cooking. A tried-and-true technique perfected over 4,000 years, kamado traditionally uses clay pots or earthen pits to produce juicy, flavorful meals. Fisher was so taken with the Japanese fare and its ease of cooking, compared to the familiar American tradition of barbecuing on metal grills, that he decided to start his own clay-cooker business when he got back home. A lot of Japanese-made products were coming into the United States in the 1970s, Fisher told me, and he started his cooker business by importing and selling the Japanese kamado pots.

“I demonstrated the product in the front of my store,” Fisher recalls, “cooking up batches of food and giving away free samples.” It was a great way for a guy with no marketing budget to introduce people to an unfamiliar cooking concept while also building his own credibility with potential customers. Not only did the charcoal-fired kamado turn out tasty food, but it also was fast—fast to start up, fast to cook, and fast and easy to clean. People loved the miracle pot and raved about it to their friends, who, in turn, would come in to Fisher’s store and pick up a kamado of their own. “Each cooker became a salesman for me,” he said.

Even so, the kamado wasn’t an instant success. One-to-one selling was a laborious way to market a product, and the pots were somewhat fragile, often had defects, and required a lot of maintenance. Fisher was reluctant to expand. The imported cookers weren’t initially something Fisher could build a business on, he admitted to me—at least not an expanding business that would include stores in other cities. Fisher keenly values his reputation for good customer service, and he knew that a flawed or fragile product such as the one he was selling was bound to stir up complaints and problems that he’d have a hard time solving. If he wanted to grow, his cooker had to evolve.

Thus began a ten-year saga that included a search for the right manufacturer and a drawn-out learning process to design the perfect cooker, which morphed from clay into a more durable, heat-resistant ceramic material, the same one used in the NASA program. Loyal customers gladly pitched in to help Fisher come up with the best design. (To this day, BGE involves customers in product design and improvement and also solicits feedback from dealers.) The customers shared their cooking experiences and suggested changes. What finally rolled off the assembly line was the Egg—not yet exclusively green, but an “original American-designed ceramic cooker,” as the company describes it.

The improved cooker still uses charcoal (Fisher recommends natural hardwood lump charcoal, not briquettes). Just ten minutes after lighting, the Egg can fire up to 750° to sear a steak. But thanks to a sophisticated system of vents and dampers, it can also cook at temperatures as low as 200°. And its thick ceramic walls retain heat so well that it can cook or smoke foods for 24 hours straight without needing additional charcoal. An easily read exterior thermometer shows the inside temperature, and the controls can keep the heat steady within a few degrees of the target level.

Eggs now come in five sizes—from the Mini, with its 9-inch diameter grill, to a monstrous XL that weighs 205 pounds and can hold two 20-pound turkeys. They’re pricey, up to $900, with a full line of optional “Eggcessories” ranging from specialty grills, tongs, and spatulas to fire starters, rib racks, seasonings, mitts, DVDs, and a baking stone for pizza. (A suggestion to offset the higher price, which we always like to tell consumers: Since the ceramics have a lifetime warranty, owners should never need to replace this grill, making the price an actual bargain.)

Eggs come in well-cushioned packing crates that can safely be shipped to customers and retailers around the country. When Fisher got the Egg out to a broader market, the customer-engagement phenomenon picked up speed. Egg owners just can’t stop cackling about their cookers, and they are articulate advocates for the product.

Fisher’s search for the right manufacturer eventually led him to Dal-Tile Corporation, a subsidiary of Mohawk Industries, which manufactures, distributes and markets high-quality ceramic tile and natural stone products. Dal-Tile is the largest ceramic tile manufacturer in the U.S. and one of the largest tile manufacturers in the world. The job Fisher was proposing was only superficially similar, but his chosen supplier was willing to learn how to make what he wanted. In addition, Fisher liked the fact that Dal-Tile had the sophisticated laboratory facilities needed to design the various ceramic components of the Egg. They had to fit together perfectly to perform to Fisher’s specifications —not an easy task with ceramics because they dry at different speeds, depending on the configuration, and might shrink or twist after leaving the kiln. Then they needed to create the paint: A special type of epoxy paint made from glass had to be concocted to give the Egg the appearance and durability Fisher demanded.

Dal-Tile solved those and many other problems to Fisher’s satisfaction, which is why he has stayed with the same supplier for more than 20 years, even though its ownership has changed hands. The people Fisher knows and trusts are still there. He told me, “It’s through their expertise that we can continue to innovate, improve, and maintain the quality of the Egg.” Fisher prides himself on being loyal to his customers, dealers, and suppliers, and his reward is their dedication and engagement with the company and each other.

The Egg paint that Fisher’s supplier mixed originally came in a paint box of colors. But one day, while Fisher was talking to a local salesperson about putting together a newspaper ad, he pointed to one of his Eggs by way of description. It happened to be green, Fisher’s favorite color, and the notion of calling the cooker and the company “the Big Green Egg” was hatched. Call it serendipity, but what better name for a product than something catchy and completely descriptive? “People remember it,” Fisher says with perfect simplicity. No Marketing 101 professor could put it better.

In the early years, sales of the Egg slowly spread to neighboring Florida and other surrounding areas as people took their cookers with them when they relocated or vacationed in nearby states. As word spread, dealers began to get inquiries from customers hunting for Eggs and contacted Fisher to place orders. Before long, more dealers became intrigued as Fisher himself, the truest of the true believers, showed off his Eggs at home and at trade shows, always cooking up a feast of appetizers, main dishes, and desserts to show people the full range of this strange contraption.

Gradually, the Big Green Egg went from being the smallest of niche players to a real powerhouse in the upscale grill industry. Fisher engaged his customers so thoroughly that they became the core of his sales crew. But as he was quick to remind me, the customer buzz wouldn’t have lasted for long if he hadn’t kept his part of the bargain. The credibility that he painstakingly built with his customers played a big part in his growing and lasting success. “Not only was the product good,” he pointed out, something that performed exactly as Fisher told people it would, “but we were able to ship on time and to do whatever else was necessary to have a satisfied customer on the other end.”

These days, the rapidly growing BGE gets outside help from DHM Group, Inc., a company that acts as a sort of outsourced marketing department. But BGE still doesn’t rely on traditional advertising campaigns because, as Fisher tells me, the Egg is not a product that people can easily relate to without some previous interest or knowledge and some hands-on training and demonstration. Instead, the marketing efforts leverage BGE’s enormously effective customer-engagement strategy by carefully choosing vehicles that already attract the knowledgeable cook—magazines such as Bon Appétit or Fine Cooking, for example. And in a free-publicity scenario that the average product promoter can only dream about, savvy magazine editors looking for the new-new thing in the sizzling world of gourmet cooking often come to the Big Green Egg for information and photos that they can incorporate into magazine features.

Dealers in the specialty barbecue, pool and patio shops where the Egg is sold appreciate the enthusiasm and loyalty that keep customers coming back. And the dealers themselves are an extraordinary bunch—more like BGE partners, really—who need to be willing to give the Egg special handling because its shape and carefully fitted components make it prone to breakage if service people get careless. The dealers need to give potential customers special handling, too. The uninitiated must be shown how this odd-looking implement works and how to cook with it for the most satisfactory results. Egg dealers need to know enough about it to answer any questions. Obviously, the required special handling is not something that the typical big-box store or Internet dealer would or could manage to Fisher’s satisfaction. That’s why BGE allows only specialty retailers to distribute its product.

Fisher is well aware that his distributors and dealers need to lavish more attention on his Eggs, and BGE recognizes and rewards them for their loyalty by offering much better margins than most of the other high-end grill companies. The dealers also like the fact that they don’t need to compete with big-box retailers, for whom low pricing is the clarion call.

Donna Meyers, the founder and CEO of the DHM Group marketing company, likes to say that Egg owners would turn over “their truck, and their dog and their other prized possessions before they’d ever consider giving you their Egg.”

She might be right. The Egghead community is a tight-knit group, and BGE nurtures and guards the Egg mystique on its Web site, the biggreenegg.com Forum, where Eggheads spend untold hours communicating with one another. Each day, 400–900 Egg lovers post messages on the Forum. They share cooking tips and recipes, answer questions, and extol the virtues of their Eggs. Their testimonials are so effective that dealers often send potential customers to the site to read the unedited comments of adoring fans or to tap BGE’s extensive cache of Egg lore. Fisher thinks the extensive consumer education aspect of the site, along with the burgeoning Web site activity, has played a big part in the company’s accelerated growth in recent years.

BGE rewards and encourages this family-like behavior by using some of the customer testimonials in its marketing brochures, catalogs, and trade ads. The Web site’s display of Egg buyers’ devotion is also a powerful tool for attracting new distributors.

But the event that may best illustrate how lovingly the company nurtures its bond with its Eggheads is its 11-year-old annual Eggtoberfest. Held on the third weekend in October at the company’s new world headquarters in Tucker, Georgia, the event originated in 1998 as a way for BGE to thank those loyal customers who regularly log on to the Web site to chat and share their Egg-cooked dishes. In 2008, more than 1,700 people enjoyed the annual reunion with their online Egghead family members. From 15 cooks firing up Big Green Eggs in 1998, the event has grown to more than 230 Eggs cooking everything from fresh-caught Alaska salmon to Maine moose kabobs.

So much fun and enthusiasm is generated at the Eggtoberfests that regional Eggfests are springing up around the country (currently 19 regionals).(While the number will keep changing, I think that great a number indicates that almost anyone can find an Eggfest near them.) Apparently, you can’t keep a good Egg down, as Fisher knew nearly 35 years ago when he started his partnership with his adoring customers.

Rules of Engagement