Event marketing at clubs can take on many forms, from e-blasts and social media posts to word-of-mouth and flyers tacked to clubhouse walls. But no club can match the uniquely personal touch found at The Little Club.
On paper, Rosemarie Brant’s position at the Gulf Stream, Fla., club is primarily administrative. But Brant, who has been with the club since 1987, also designs daily menus and covers, holiday-themed flyers and posters, and even creates and coordinates invitations, menus and place cards by request for members’ private parties. Most impressively, nothing is mass-produced, with Brant personally making each piece.
In the year 2012 alone, Brant has created over 2,300 handmade menus for the club’s 300 members, their families and guests, often adding tactile, 3-D effects like feathers on a chick’s head for an Easter menu, paper drink umbrellas for an “Island Night” celebration, or cotton “foam” overflowing from a beer stein.
Brant honed her skills for menu-making starting in 2003, when the club opted to produce its monthly newsletter in-house to save money. With the help of a large color copier and basic clip art, Brant taught herself, through trial and error, the finer points of design, advanced printing, and photography.
“We believe that anything and everything Rosemarie looks at is with an eye for future menu covers and promotional ideas,” says Marilyn Wobeser, The Little Club’s Membership Liaison. “Of course, it does not hurt that she is a Martha Stewart, JoAnn Fabrics and Michael’s [craft store] ‘addict.’ ”
The overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception from the club’s membership has kept Brant plugging away on new designs that are tailor-made for each event. For a gourmet wine dinner, she designed a champagne bucket with the menu printed on a slide-out bottle. For Father’s Day, she produced tailored men’s shirts with assorted fabric ties and tie tacks made with small footballs, golf balls and fishing lures.
“The members love Rosemarie’s menus!” Wobeser says. “They take them home to share with friends and family. One member ‘snail-mails’ them to his family in North Carolina.”
The club’s President has even brought menus to Board meetings and passed them around for all to see, in case someone was not able to attend an event captured by Brant’s talents.
“With encouragement from the General Manager and positive reinforcement from the members, Rosemarie’s passion for cutting, pasting and gluing, and for ribbons, pearls and ‘all things butterflies’ continues to blossom,” says Wobeser.
What’s more, Brant does much of the shopping for supplies, and the individual assembly of pieces, on her personal time. She reviews instructional YouTube videos and researches how-to websites to learn how to create the desired effects. Fittingly, each creation is always finished with a special inscription on the back: “Designed especially for you by Rosemarie.”
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