Maui Wowi Rubs Shoulders with American Idol!

News12 Long Island invited Maui Wowi to be on camera for their Beach Week feature this morning at Cedar Beach in Babylon--at 5am! We'll do anything for 15 minutes (more like seconds!) of fame, so we packed the trailer and arrived for a beautiful sunrise. We were interviewed by Elisa DiStefano (first photo), one of News 12's reporters--and man, can she take charge of a group! Definitely must have been president of her senior class. Elisa did live remotes from the beach to tell viewers what they can do for their own summer beach-theme party. Make smoothies, have a clam bake, great music/DJ (my friend Echo from Fantasy Music was on hand). Then Kevin Covais--the Long Island boy who made it big on American Idol--showed up for a guest appearance. He and his dad came down to the beach, and Kevin sang his signature number from Idol, If I Fall in Love. He is a classy kid and of course had the good sense to down a Strawberry Banana Maui Wowi before singing, and then a Pina Colada afterwards.

Jones Beach Theatre/Nine Inch Nails

I wish I were a better photographer so you could see the amazing show from Nine Inch Nails at Jones Beach last night. Not the show that was on stage--I'm talking the people. It was a tatoo fest--more ink than the Sunday NY Times! Girls in shoes that looked like something Herman Munster would wear. Lots of black fishnet. And a guy who's T-shirt says, "F*ck you, you f*ckin' f*ck." Alrighty then! But whoever they are, whatever their music, they like Maui Wowi smoothies. So they can't be all bad!

Happy 35th Anniversary, Southwest Airlines!

Southwest Airlines, which knows a thing or two about how to have fun and deliver great customer service, did both today at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, NY. They hired Maui Wowi to provide smoothies for their customers in appreciation of their business. About 2,700 passengers go through the Southwest terminal at Macarthur each day -- and more than 500 of them stopped by for a Strawberry Banana or Pina Colada Maui Wowi.

One Busy Weekend

It was quite a weekend for Maui Wowi in the NY/LI area. The Belmont Stakes took place yesterday and one of our NYC franchise owners did very well there with smoothies and coffee--with the cool weather it was mostly a coffee crowd. Mairim Garriga, our franchisee, had eight people working at the event. Up in Newburgh, NY, our new Connecticut franchise owner Stephanie Simmons was doing a bar mitzvah party. I was also doing a bar mitzvah last night in Manhattan (Maui Wowi's smoothies are KOF-K Kosher.) At the same time, my employees were working at the opening night of the Friends of the Arts Summer Festival in Oyster Bay, LI. We sold about three smoothies but about 300 cups of coffee--it was cold! Meanwhile, another crew of mine was over at the Nikon at Jones Beach Theatre at the Rob Thomas/Jewel concert. And today we topped off the weekend with a house party in Bellmore, LI. A laid back pool party for 60 people.

The SOAPnet Upfront Promotion

One of our favorite corporate clients is ABC-TV. Each June for the past three years, we have worked with them on a promotion we call the Smoothie Tour. ABC is promoting SOAPnet, its soap opera cable network, for the upfront media buying season. We go to eight ad agencies in Manhattan over the month and set up our smoothie bar. We pour our smoothies in SOAPnet logo cups, and there's a video promoting SOAPnet's programming running. It's a lot of fun for everyone and a great break for hard-working media planners. We make about 100-200 smoothies at each event over the course of two to three hours. Here we are at Universal McCann, the first stop on the tour.

Maui Wowi at Blind Tug-a-Jet Corporate Challenge

We attended a really fun event on June 4 -- the annual Blind Tug-a-Jet Corporate Challenge at Republic Airport on Long Island. It is sponsored by the Foundation for Sight and Sound, which supports charities aimed at the sight and hearing impaired. Corporate teams do a variety of competitions that help them empathize with the blind or deaf. The teams pull a Lear Jet blindfolded in a timed competition! Maui Wowi franchisees often do charity events at which we donate some or all of our proceeds to the charity. It's a fun way to meet new people and support great causes. And sometimes it's also a great way for my son to eat prodigious amounts of great food, in this case from Famous Dave's Bar-B-Que.