Small Business Saturday is an alternative to Black Friday when Americans are encouraged to patronize small businesses rather than big box stores. Last year, to promote Small Business Saturday, American Express had a video competition for small businesses. I forget what the prize was exactly, but it was good and we wanted to win it. So we wrote up a script and practiced a bunch. The best video camera we had was on Taylor’s iPhone, so we shot it on that. Most of the other videos submitted only had the owner talking about the business, so we thought we stood out by including the whole staff. To our chagrin, we didn’t get selected.
Watching it again now, one thing really stands out to me: we were all terrified to be on camera! We were so nervous that we kept messing up and laughing. Finally, our neighbor in the next office over, with whom we share a vent, shouted at us to stop after he heard us a few dozen times chant in unison, “We’re Mata Traders and this is our business story.”
The coolest part about looking back a year later is that now there are 2 more of us! (That would be Bree and Scott.) How many will we be next year?
Here’s the (in)famous video, making an encore performance: