Chattanooga Native Showing Products at QDMA Convention
Chattanooga Times Free Press
When the Quality Deer Management Association holds its annual convention Saturday and Sunday at the Chattanooga Convention Center, it will be a homecoming for Indialantic, Fla., businesswoman Kim Pezzeminti.
But it will mean a lot more than just a visit home.
The 1983 Hixson High School graduate, then Kim Roberts, owns the Doeville line of products designed especially for women hunters, and she will display them at the show.
As she grew up in Chattanooga, her father introduced her to the taste of venison and even took her along on some hunting trips, but she didn't shoot a gun until she was 42 years old. Amazingly, she killed a buck with her first shot, 120 yards away with a muzzleloader rifle.
"I was hooked after that",she said recently.
She spent two decades in the tile industry, working with Ceramic Tile of Chattanooga (now Louisville Tile Distributors) and Crossville Tile Distributors as creative director. She credits Thilo Vest, who owned Ceramic Tile, with much of her business knowledge.
She moved to Florida in 2005 and met the man who would become her husband on a flight home from a show in Las Vegas.
"We were married in Colorado, changed clothes and went elk hunting," she said.
Her husband is in the floor-covering business, with interests stretching from Jacksonville to Boca Raton.
Kim became interested in QDMA while attending the show here last year. She had come home for a visit.
"I was especially impressed at what a professionally organized show it was," she said.
She will have a 20x20 display at the 2008 event. Her products include a diary, a backpack, fragrance-free goat milk soap, natural milk balm, Treestand Tea, jewelry, copies of the book "Heart Shots" about women's hunting adventures, and knives from Frost Cutlery of Chattanooga.
Frost is developing a special knife for women, Pezzeminti said.
Almost all of the Doeville products are made in the United States. Custom Werks of Chattanooga does the T-shirt printing, and Small Fish Web Solutions of Chattanooga designed the Doeville.com Web site, Pezzeminti said.
Based about halfway between Melbourne and Daytona Beach, Fla., about 20 miles from Cape Canaveral, the Pezzemintis have leased about 1,000 acres near Milledgeville, Ga., for hunting. They went on a safari to central Africa, and Kim didn't hunt there but demonstrated cooking of kudos and other wild game.
Next weekend's show will be her debut in displaying her products, so she expects to add to her hometown memories.
The QDMA show, which features a number of products for deer hunters and seminars on making food plots and other phases of the sport, almost was set up this year for Athens, Ga., which would keep it near the organization's headquarters in Bogart. But the popularity of Chattanooga and its facilities brought it back, according to QDMA officials.
- Dan Cook
