Craft beer is an art. By blending creativity and science, breweries can create one-of-a-kind products that draw the most loyal consumers in the alcoholic beverage industry.
The brewers we know take great care in crafting their product, building loyal local audiences, and promoting their brand online. But once word has spread beyond their close community, the biggest challenge becomes fulfilling orders. How can brewers nurture those relationships when the buyer can’t come for a visit to the taproom?
For decades, on-site purchasing and traditional distribution networks had been the only routes for consumers to get their favorite beer. As a result, brewers not only had to satisfy their fans, but also the distributors, who favored crowd-pleasers with mass appeal over unique brews. A trade-off for increased sales is the loss of the relationships they had worked hard to cultivate, now controlled by the retailer and distributor. In an age of cult beer, this model simply no longer works.
These middle-men between the brewery and consumer add another obstacle: lack of control over how the beer is treated in transit. How far did it travel before reaching the consumer? Was it left in a hot truck? These questions are left unanswered, with little transparency between the parties involved.
As a brewer, you want to know that your product looks and tastes right when it reaches the consumer. We’ve heard the horror stories… beer being shipped in used microwave boxes, shipments with missing or destroyed cans, disregard for refrigeration requests. Right now, when beer is transported across the country, breweries have no control of or visibility into how that’s happening. Another mystery? What your consumer is thinking when they do finally get ahold of your product.
This is where direct-to-consumer (DTC) fulfillment comes in.
In the wake of COVID, the beer industry has been thrown into the world of consumer-direct shopping. For the first time, highly sought-after and smaller-scale breweries were able (and, in some ways, forced to) distribute in a new way. By utilizing a DTC model, breweries can have those valuable, authentic relationships with their audience, market directly to them, and gain a larger share of the profit. Instead of bending to what distributors want or expect, breweries can focus on crafting one-of-a-kind products.
While only larger breweries benefitted from fulfillment services in the past, DTC is now favorable to smaller breweries. Craft brewers can supply previously underserved markets, and in turn expand their brand and reach new audiences.
The challenge to brewers is now finding a fulfillment partner to trust.
Wineshipping is the fastest, most accurate, and most cost-efficient delivery network for wine, beer, spirits, and more. We started in the wine industry over two decades ago (hence the name), and have grown rapidly to become the largest and most sustainable network in the US. Our warehouses are equipped with temperature and humidity control, and are placed near your consumers for fulfillment that’s both cheap and fast. By optimizing across our 15 warehouse sites, you can reach up to 99.2% of US consumers within 2 days from order placement to delivery, with 58% eligible for next-day delivery.
Packaging is key for craft brewers, as is ensuring brand presence spans from order placement to unboxing. Wineshipping offers best-in-class packaging to delight your consumers and give them an experience they won’t soon forget. Our packaging and service guarantees give you the peace of mind to keep doing what you do best.
We’ve learned a lot from our time in wine, and we’re using those lessons to help brewers like you adapt to consumer expectations, government regulations, and our quickly growing market.
DTC is the future of craft beer and it is time for breweries to make the switch.
Wineshipping is a tech-enabled third-party logistics (3PL) provider for alcoholic beverage companies, managing the fastest, most accurate, and most cost-efficient delivery network in the US for wine, beer, spirits, and more. Wineshipping was recently named the North Bay Business Journal’s Supplier of the Year (Wine Beer & Spirits Awards).