What’s in a name?

An exciting part of starting a business or launching a new product is choosing a name. Just ask Matt Hammond

Photo: Matt Hammond, owner of Rim Jobs & Meat Rub Co.

LET’S GET IT out of the way, right up top: yes, Matt Hammond, creator of Rim Jobs & Meat Rub Co., is in on the joke, even if you bump into him downtown and he plays dumb. It’s Caesar rimmer and meat rub — get your mind out of the gutter, man.

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“To be honest, when I came up with the Rim Jobs name, I thought, ‘This is hilarious — someone has to be doing this already,’” Hammond recalls. “But when I went on the Ontario Business Registry search, nothing came up. Then, when I went to register the name, I’m thinking all along, ‘This isn’t going to work, right?’ But sure enough, it did work.”

So, on March 23, 2021, Rim Jobs & Meat Rub Co. was officially born.

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Fast forward a year-and-a-half to September 2022. Two friends whom he had been supplying with bags of the meat rub, Nick Twum and Josh DeMelo, were opening a fitness studio and were asking for more. At this point, the meat rub was just something he’d been making at home for friends and family. He pulled together some rudimentary packaging, a small display and headed off to the studio’s open house, where he rang up $300 in sales.

“That kicked my butt into gear,” Hammond says. “I knew the next step was to find more markets, but I was super hesitant — I figured nobody is going to want to deal with me because of the name. But I just went ahead, thinking that some people would probably see the humour in it.”

He landed himself at a Wester Fair District show where he did $600 in sales, followed that with another market where he sold $800 worth of product and then onto another where he rang up $1,600. It was at this point that it started to dawn on him: the Caesar rimmers and meat rubs, which maybe, kind of, probably started out as a gag more than anything else, might actually be something he could turn into a viable business.

“I was like, ‘Man, this is awesome. I’m quitting my job,’” he laughs. “Which was a rookie mistake. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Fast forward again, to the present day, and things are settling into the kind of pattern that small, sole-proprietor operations often follow. Rim Jobs (there are four varieties of rimmers plus the meat rub) is now in 17 restaurants and 13 retail stores around the city, plus Hammond is starting to get serious about online sales — an area where the colourful moniker may very well be a marketing advantage.

Hammond regularly produces his products out of The Grove, the Western Fair District’s agri-business hub, using locally-sourced applewood smoked peppers that he personally smokes, dehydrates and grinds himself. He received a $5,000 grant from the Foodpreneur Advantage Program (via the London Small Business Centre) that helped him develop his packaging; he’s also working on new products, playing around with various cocktail rimmers and additional meat rubs.

“Really, a lot of it is about marketing,” Hammond reasons. “That’s another thing I’m trying to work on this year. I’ve done everything myself so far.”

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Indeed, you can often find Hammond doing his ­networking the old-fashioned way — chatting with people in bars and restaurants, sparking up conversations, showing off his wares. And with a name like Rim Jobs, it usually makes for memorable word-of-mouth marketing.

“Usually, I get a pretty good chuckle out of people,” he says. “Whether you love it or hate it, you tend to remember it.” Kieran Delamont