In 2020 I walked into Buc-ee's, spent $3,000, and walked out with an unofficial partnership to sell all of their products online

You've heard of Buc-ee's, yes? The Texas-sized 120 pump gas station with a cult following?

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Time for a story:

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Buc-ee's is a phenomenon.

Pristine bathrooms

Costco-sized

8 figure/year stores

Cult, loyal following (think Disney)

Iconic beaver mascot apparel

No online sales

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Wait, what?

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Yep, I was shocked too. Their site gets millions of hits & you can't buy anything!

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I set out to change this in 2020.

I own a 3PL. We ship stuff for eCom stores. So I reached out to Buc-ee's with a pitch:

"Let us open your store and ship your stuff."

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Crickets.

So I did it myself.

I took my whole family to Buc-ee's and bought 1 of everything for ~$3k

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The cashiers were shocked. It took hours, but it was worth it.

I brought everything to our warehouse and hired someone to take nice pics.

We put it up on a Shopify site and called it Beaver Snax.

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My launch strategy? Tell all the reporters.

It worked!

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The Buc-ee's lawyer called me immediately.

"We actually love what you're doing. We don't want to touch eCom, but go for it. But change the name. No beavers."

No sweat! I said. We hadn't even launched yet.

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http://TexasSnacks.com was born.

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The "snacks" domain wasn't open at first, so it started as Texas Snax. But later we bought the domain from a private seller.

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Everyone wrote about us:

Southern Living

Eater

Texas Monthly

Etc

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We did 6 figures our first month with no ad-spend, and we haven't stopped growing since.

I can't take credit for running it so masterfully, my biz partner @KirkSalisbury does that. I'm 0-1.

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2.5 years later and it's an amazing business. We ship shirts and snacks to thousands of people across the world, and Buc-ee's is an amazing partner.

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We're just getting started!

Thanks for reading.