Crowdfunder — The Final Push.
So after three weeks of pushing, hustling and pleading, we’re into the final week of our crowdfunding campaign. It’s not something that any of us in the business enjoy — asking for money — so in that respect it’ll be a relief to reach the end, and go back to what we’re best at.
The thing is though, we really need to hit that target. I mean, REALLY need to. Because of the slightly odd way that the platform is set up, we’ve been allocated a grant from Sadiq Khan’s “Pay It Forward” fund to support small businesses affected by Covid. This is absolutely critical to our survival. However, if you don’t hit your target then this grant disappears. It seems bizarre that businesses who are successful are rewarded with more money, but those who fall short are punished. We’ve huge sympathy for anyone who’s fallen foul of this up to now, but are firmly focussed on not joining their ranks.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, we’ve tried to do what we thought was the right thing, closing before Johnson instructed people to do so, only reopening when we genuinely thought we could do it safely, and have doubtless suffered financially because of this. If we’d done what some others have done, there wouldn’t even be any need for a crowdfund. But we didn’t, and there is.
Steve and I don’t come from rich backgrounds and have had to fight for everything we’ve got for the past five years in an increasingly competitive and cynical marketplace. The biggest just want to get bigger, and nuance and creativity are being stymied by the drive for domination. It’s a world we don’t recognise and have no interest in being a part of. It’s no longer the universal “beer people are good people” world of old, but it is what it is and we all need to find a way to co-exist within it.
We’ve never compromised on anything, have managed to employ one of the brightest brewing talents in the industry in our Stirling, we have a designer in Tida who has no equal on this planet, and have developed an industry-leading festival in our Cask series. We back ourselves relentlessly, and long for a time when things are just slightly easier, and spreadsheets don’t need to be agonized over quite so, well, agonizingly!
From those freezing cold winter days in a Tottenham shipping container, through memorable summers in Bermondsey with some of the best friends we’ll ever make, and now with a fantastic new crowd in less-trumpeted parts of South London, we’re happy with where we are and can’t wait to take the next steps. We have big plans that we can’t wait to share with you.
So we’re back to where we started. We desperately need that final push to help us over the line, and we hope never to have to run a crowdfunding campaign again. We’ve tried to offer something a little bit different in our rewards, and the response has been amazing and humbling. We’ll be forever grateful to those who have supported us thus far, and we’re launching some very special stuff for the final week. The two new rewards really sum up who we are as a brewery, and it would be the very loveliest thing if it were these offers that got us over the line.
As we ease our way out of the nightmare of the past twelve months, we hope we can all work together to help create a better industry, and in our own small way, as much as we ever can, a better world. Lessons must be learned.
Much love. Please, stay safe and look after yourselves.
As another old socialist once said…
