Gledfield Distillery is a craft distillery based in Ardgay, Sutherland and founded by Ciara Bow. Ciara’s ambition is to bring an ancient botanical spirit back to life, inspired by the recipe belonging to her great, great grandmother, Marjorie MacBeath. Born in 1884 Marjorie was a bit of a rebel… she was an illicit distiller! One day, she was nearly caught when the excise men came from Beauly by horse and cart. Luckily for Marjorie, she saw them coming and she took her pot still and hid it under her petticoats! Over a century later, Gledfield Distillery is on a mission to resurrect Marjorie’s recipe for botanical spirit, made with oats and other botanicals such as fruits and flowers… and keeping alive the same rebel spirit of Marjorie!
Ciara had a stretch target of raising £25,000 to purchase equipment for the distillery, including a pot still, bottle filling machine, bottles and packaging. Starting any business is expensive, but a distillery requires a lot of specialist equipment that comes with a pretty price tag! Over the course of a six-week long campaign, Ciara raised an incredible £11,135 from 139 people.
She offered a selection of rewards ranging from £35-£1000, including early access to her first botanical spirit at an introductory price, supporters’ names on the distillery wall mural, distillery tours and the opportunity to become a distiller for a day.
Early access to the first botanical spirit was at an introductory price to provide the first customers with a wee discount, to say thank you for their support and for helping Ciara to fund her business. The wall mural provided a great option for supporters to have their name written in history – literally! – and was a limited edition offer. The product rewards were complemented by in-person experiences to give a real variety of rewards. Ciara felt it was important to have several rewards at various price points to suit different budgets and was careful to factor in costs such as packaging, postage and campaign fees when working out how to price her rewards.
It took about four weeks for Ciara to prepare her campaign before going live, not a long time but it was doable – just! Initially the campaign was due to run for four weeks but Ciara decided to extend it to six weeks to maximise on ongoing PR opportunities. In all, the whole campaign was planned and finalised in 10 weeks.
Ciara carried out a lot of preparation before her campaign went live. From fine-tuning the story, creating a folder of marketing assets, mapping out contacts, discussing reward options with suppliers and doing the financial calculations. In addition to this, she spent a lot of time researching previous crowdfunding campaigns and prepared a social media content schedule – doing all this preparation made it a lot easier when the campaign went live.
What Ciara found most difficult about crowdfunding was the fear of the unknown! It was her first crowdfunding campaign and she was nervous about how people would respond. But she says she need not have been so worried, because the response and support she received was amazing and so positive. At first she also found it difficult to ask people to support, but with each day, she reminded herself why she was doing it and with time and practice, her confidence grew.
At the beginning of her campaign, Ciara contacted all her friends, family members and contacts to let them know that Gledfield Distillery was crowdfunding and why. It took a lot of time to contact everyone individually, but it was a very valuable exercise.
In addition to this, social media worked well to increase awareness and reach a larger audience – Ciara updated her social media every single day! But as a new business, it was sometimes difficult to create fresh content, so this was a wee bit challenging at times. Another challenge was that Ciara felt a lot of people did not understand what crowdfunding was and/or how the crowdfunding campaign functions, so it was sometimes difficult to explain it to people.
Aside from the money raised, Ciara’s campaign allowed her to start building her customer base for Gledfield Distillery and she also received a lot of PR which was beneficial in building brand awareness.
Here’s Ciara’s top three tips for you if you are thinking about crowdfunding for your business:
- Ask people (that you trust will give you honest feedback) to review your campaign, before it goes live
- Keep reminding people about why you’re crowdfunding
- Don’t be shy to ask people to support you
And finally, to inspire you to give it a go, Ciara says:
“Our crowdfunding campaign has been an amazing experience and the benefits have been huge! Be brave and give it a go!”
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