Episode 9: Donnie Ferneau: Building Relationships with Local Food

09/19/18 • 35 min

Ferneau is quick to point out that he has a good team. His method of management lines up with his own personal philosophy -- being able to learn from mistakes and move forward. “Competition is natural, and you always want to be the best, but I guess you have to be beaten down a bit or be born a little bit wiser to be able to take a step back and look at your failures, rather then brush them under the rug and say they never happened,” Ferneau said. “Something I’ll say to people, if they look at it through a peephole or somewhat of a closed mind, it will piss them off, but whenever I see somebody fail, and they come and tell me about it, usually complaining, I just ask them, ‘Did you learn anything? What did you learn?’ And sometimes, if they’re already aggravated, they’re quick to think I’m being condescending with them, but literally I’m asking a question. ‘What did you learn from this? Okay, it might have cost you x amount of dollars, but what did you learn from it?’ When my cooks burn something or they mess up a stock, or just little weird things that cost me money, I’m investing in that person right there. ‘What did you learn from this? It was an expensive mistake, so tell me you learned something. ‘Cause I just don’t want to just fire you.’ It took me a long time to get there. You have to put your ego in your pocket sometimes.”

Special Guest: Donnie Ferneau.

Special Guest: Donnie Ferneau.

Previous Episode

Episode 8: Tabatha Reeves: Storytelling with Candle Scents

And they keep their product lines interesting, even taking special orders. “We have these really unique niche scents in some of our candles, so they work really well for historical reenactors, but they’re not going to sell to somebody else,” Reeves said. “We have a state park that we contract to that deals with historical reenactors all the time, and one of their properties on the park is a jail. We designed an entire line of candles just for their jail, scents that would have been in a jailhouse in the mid-1800s to early 1900s when it was operational.”

One of those specialty scents is called The Sheriff. “It kind of smells like this dirty man that’s been smoking a pipe,” Reeves explained. “When I smell it, I get the thought of the cowboy with his feet up on the desk, and the big sheriff badge and a hat over his face, sleeping while his prisoners are in the cells behind him. That’s what it conjures for me. Many of our scents are like that. You can smell it and you can conjure this idea of what it is supposed to be in your head.”

But not everyone can smell the candles. “A lot of men can’t smell,” Reeves explained. “I didn’t realize this until I started dealing with men on a regular basis. Men, blue-collar workers, a lot of them can’t smell because they’ve worked around chemicals their whole life. Or they’ve worked around major smells their whole life. My dad is a maintenance man at a roofing plant. My dad can’t smell anything. Asphalt’s burned the inside of his nose. So he can’t smell candles. My dad can’t smell when something is cooking. And he’s not the only one.”

Special Guest: Tabatha Reeves.

Next Episode

Episode 10: Diane Harper: Exposing Boogeymen with Ink Blots

Harper’s parents met while her father, Hal, was stationed overseas--her mother was French. They became a military family, with Harper the middle child of three. “I was a sick kid a lot and I grew up overseas in the military,” said Harper. “Just past toddler age in Berlin, when the Berlin wall was up, and things were pretty heated for the Cold War at the time. And I think my boogeyman was born in Berlin. Everything had barbed wire. There were armed guards everywhere, and so it was just kind of a terrifying place through a five-year-old’s eyes, but you don’t really have the vocabulary to deal with that. And then to be a sick kid in a military hospital with mostly adults around you, not a children’s hospital. It was kind of an unfriendly place. And there were noises at night and things like that, and my father was a police officer. so I knew there was danger and boogeyman out there but I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, so even as an adult I have a hard time coming up with that vocabulary, but I don’t have a hard time coming up with a visual vocabulary to describe it. And by allowing them to come to surface from my subconscious, it kind of allows me to embrace them in a different way as an adult and kind of be playful with them and be grateful that I had such a vivid imagination from the way we lived and grew up. I lived in the heart of fairy tales. We traveled in Bavaria and the Black Forest was around there, and the birthplace of Hansel and Gretel. And all of these kinds of bizarre folktales that we grew up with that were basically cautionary tales to children to mind their moms, but it was kind of a wonderful place.”

There are a few ways to find Diane's art in person: she'll be at Art on the Creeks in Rogers, Arkansas on Sept. 29; she'll have some work in the Fiber Arts Show on Nov. 2, and at the Gallery 26 Holiday Show. She also has a booth at South Main Creative.

Special Guest: Diane Harper.