Horses - The Sawyer Creek Foal Cam Success - July 2001 - equiworld.net

The Sawyer Creek Foal Cam Success

Oh my...where do I start...well, it all started with my son's idea of building us a web page, which blossomed and expanded until we had a live foal cam. From the live foal cam and message board we built a huge world wide following, from England, Australia, New Zealand...literally every corner of the earth and all parts of the US.

We had 12 foals born on our live cam...not only was this fantastic for us because of the audience we sold many foals before they were even born but fantastic for the viewers who enjoyed the births. Two newpapers even did quite nice feature articles on us and our unique marketing approach of the live foal cam. They built up quite a little club calling themselves "Creekies" after the name of our farm Sawyer Creek. To date we have over 420,000 hits from which my server says over 200,000 are unique! Then even after the foals were born, they continued to watch and participate on the message board site...which they still do! Check it out at www.sawyercreek.com on any day. The message board gets over 100 messages! Some days 300!

Anyway, several suggested they would like to meet us and the foals that they saw born in person and that an organized date would be in order to save us the constant weekends of visitors (which I must say we get anyway). So...what started out as a simple weekend barbecue grew and grew until soon we had a full blown horsey woodstock!

We hired a live classic rock style band, had a team of Belgians give wagon rides down our country road, had a 300 pound pig roast, an 80 pound beef quarter, 3 deep fried turkeys, 160 hot dogs and beer butt chicken! We had a bonfire in the evening to top it off. Well, what we originally thought was going to be maybe 20 people kept growing and growing and so did the enthusiasm. Two women came from the United Kingdom...one even wrote the Her Royal Highness (The Queen of England) who is big horse enthusiast and sent her one of the newspaper articles! She dictated a letter back through her Lady in Waiting! We had several fly in from California which is quite the cross country trip. We had an 87 year old woman and her daughter come in from Louisiana making Ja mbalaya in her hotel room to share with all! Complete with crawdads! They came from Florida, Virginia, Illinois...so many states I can't even remember. Our turn out was around 300 but could have been more as there were so many and too hard to count.

Our farm was crammed with people...some were Appaloosa people, some were prospective Appaloosa people, and some were Appaloosa people by the time they left! It was a great time held by all and a nicer group of people you could not have met. I guess the moral to the story is, that even a smaller breeder like ourselves can make a big impact if you try!