“Brooke and I are thrilled to share the story behind Bootlegger Runs and what the app is all about.

Jim Johnson, a close friend of ours, invited us to watch the Tennessee VOLS play in the Music City Bowl in December of 2021, and while there we made new friends that would lead to several more trips to Nashville. Fast forward to three o'clock on a cold and rainy Friday afternoon in April 2022 (this will be an important point in just a moment!! LOL). As we worked in our home office, located on the west side of Knoxville, we discovered that we were out of Cylk Cozart's Bourbon simply called, interestingly enough, Cylk… the only way to get more is to call Jim, call Cylk, or head to the Tennessee Distilling Company located 45 miles west… 45 miles west on I-40 at three o'clock on a cold and rainy Friday afternoon… NO WAY! That Run would take an hour and a half to drive there and an hour and a half back - THREE hours to get a few bottles of Cylk… it's good, but not that good - LOL!!

Well, as Brooke and I sat there, wishing we had some Cylk, I looked at Brooke and asked, “Brooke, I know you don't know, but, if you were to guess, how many cars, trucks, motorcycles… vehicles… are heading west bound on I-40 that will pass right by Watt Road?” Brooke replied, “I don't know… maybe 600,000??” And I say, “How many of them do you think would be willing to bring us some Cylk if we offered to give them $50? Like, they're already heading this way!” It was at that moment when we both looked at each other and said, “Holy shit! Do you know what we just created?” Almost instantly, we both knew we had created an “errand marketplace”, so to speak, where everyone could now help a new friend out without becoming a career courier service!

On April 4, while at lunch at Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken with our friend, Tyke Hilmer, a franchise owner at TradeBank, Brooke and Tyke were chatting and catching up on their mutual love for tailgating during TN VOLS football season (Rich really isn't a sports kind of guy so he didn't really care). While Brooke and Tyke talked, Tyke used an expression of “Bootlegging” something they do while tailgating; and instantly, Brooke and I looked at each other and said, “That's it! That's our name!!”

I mean, is there any association to bootlegging and the Cylk bourbon we wanted on Friday, April 1, absolutely there is. However, within seconds of originally thinking of the Cylk errand we needed, we immediately knew there would be an unlimited number of errands people would want someone else to run for them… maybe thousands… maybe millions!! So, for the rest of your life, you have a “Bootlegging friend” to help you out when you need to run an errand, but just don't have the time!