Localisation lessons from a cheeky beer brand

For craft beer enthusiasts like me, one of the pleasant surprises of lockdown was that beer somehow fell into the bucket of essential services. Obviously not in pubs, but available in supermarkets and via courier home delivery.

I discovered this while browsing Facebook one morning from my Timaru lockdown. Facebook’s diabolical algorithm offered me an advertisement for Miramar brewery Double Vision and their pleasing ‘‘Smooth Operator’’. A fave of mine.

The online fulfilment was easy, delivery less so. Even accounting for the distance between Timaru and Miramar, a week seemed too long so I rang. I got a guy called Harry on the line, and he apologised profusely and offered to send another slab in urgent courier.

It arrived in the Riviera of the South within 12 hours. Followed by the original purchase a week later due to a snafu by the courier company. The beer was great, but the prompt and personal service stuck in my mind.

Double Vision came across my radar this week again with their cheeky launch of a special hazy India Pale Ale (IPA).

Called Juice Cinda IPA, it features a Rosie the Riveter image that bears some resemblance to a certain prime minister – mischievous marketing at its best.

There’s also a strong social good element, with $2 from every taphouse pint and 50 per cent of outside sales profits going to I am Hope – Mike King’s mental health charity.

Significantly, the hazy drop was brewed during alert level 3, so the lads really had no idea when patrons would be able to enjoy it. And like many businesses they also had no idea if their cashflow would survive an unknown period of lockdown.

Because 90 per cent of Double Vision’s major accounts were closed they had barely any income for six weeks so had to look at other opportunities for generating income. As well as laying down the hazy IPA, this saw them undertaking contract

Double Vision’s Warren Drahota, pictured above with the Juice Cinda IPA. brewing for other local breweries, setting up a webshop in just a week and doing contract canning for other companies.

There are two themes underlying this – hustle and local. Themes that I think will be important for most small-tomedium-sized businesses that sell physical products and services in the post Covid-19 environment.

Hustle is about looking at your resources and proactively trying to peddle them to clients that are off your normal radar. For Double Vision, their most expensive piece of kit was their flash new canning machine, so it made sense to peddle that capacity to others.

Looking at the idea of local, this has been pivotal to Double Vision’s growth.

‘‘We knew that we had the potential to create great beer, but we needed more than that to give Double Vision a really solid foundation in a market with over 200 craft breweries,’’ co-founder Warren Drahota said.

Their approach to meeting this challenge was to embrace a mantra of community first.

‘‘We’ve drawn on people and resources from Wellington’s Eastern Suburbs from day one,’’ Drahota said.

‘‘This has included the trades staff who helped fit out the brewery and taproom, to patron engagement, staff recruitment and support of local community groups.’’

It’s also seen the business supporting the Eastern Suburbs community through the tap house, and the wider community through events like Miramarvellous, their local bars, restaurants and grocery stores. Their programme called Brew for Good offers $2 per taproom pint to a local charity.

To my way of thinking what a bunch of twenty-somethings in Miramar have done provides a pretty good localisation playbook for other SMEs struggling in a radically different reality.

Don’t be backwards on hustle. Embrace local. And if you can, brew great beer.

Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and strategy adviser. His Twitter handle is @modsta.

‘‘We’ve drawn on people and resources from Wellington’s Eastern Suburbs from day one.’’