Special Project Making a Big Impact

It's been a year in the making, but RHD has finally finished a very special project for the American Brahman Breeder's Association and the World Brahman Congress. This post is officially dedicated to Tyler Hahn, former RHD intern from summer 2007 (you'll see why later).

It all started at Houston in March 2007, when I had a conversation with RHD client and World Brahman Congress chairman Kevin Bryant. We were trying to think of a cool fund-raiser for the Congress that people would actually enjoy giving to....not feel hassled. So, we borrowed an idea from the Texas Longhorn Association and I volunteered to coordinate a special edition poster featuring 100 brands of Brahman breeders.

So, we started out by trying to sell the brand spaces. We had 100 spots to sell, and lucky for me they just sold out like hotcakes. Since there really isn't a lot of Brahman memorabilia everyone was really getting excited.

Well.....it just so happened that all the brand spots started selling in June 2007, which is right about the time when our 2007 intern, Tyler Hahn, arrived in Boling. This was his first project, and one of the major projects he did all summer. First of all he had to design all the brands -- which if you know about brands -- you know some can get pretty elaborate. Of course there were some easy ones, like the V8, but there were others that took literally hours and hours to try to create. After that, he had to contact all the brand buyers, just to confirm that we had their brand, their ranch name, and their city and state correct. I bet if you ask Tyler about any Brahman ranch on the poster today -- he'd still be able to tell you the ranch name, brand and state! After Tyler left, we still had a lot to do, and that is when Tricia began working here so she got the project next. She picked up on designing and getting brands approved. She worked steadily on this from September to April.

Besides the brands -- we had the artwork part of the poster. I hired C.J. Brown, our Shorthorn friend from Illinois, to be the artist. The Brahman group auctioned off 9 cow spaces and 1 bull space to be on the poster. The final print turned out to be amazing! All the breeders were just blown away by how accurate C.J. made the drawing based on the pictures they sent in.

So, the official "unveiling" of this big project was a few weeks ago at the World Brahman Congress in Fort Worth. I donated 1,000 posters (on behalf of the ranch my dad works at -- V8 Ranch) to the association so that each participant at the Congress would have one to take home as a souvenier. All in all the project was the biggest fund-raiser for the congress...all in all it brought in over $30,000 for the event, and is something that many Brahman breeder's from across the world will treasure!