17/06/2024
Chew & Brews started in 2020 mid-pandemic when James began to post food paired with craft beers and an idea was born. If people do it with wine, why aren’t they doing it with beer?
Months were spent designing our ingredients, our branding and learning how to design a website and jump through the multiple loops that a new small business has to jump through and an investor came on board to make an idea a reality.
Market stalls were begun locally with particular shout outs to and but something was missing, beer! Whilst the addition of beer increased sales, it brought with it increased costs and restricted where we could operate due to pre-existing agreements with other companies and so the move was made online and things grew!
Supported by so many brewers but in particular at , , , and so many others as well as kind words of advice from when at , Chew & Brews began to slave away mercilessly at the Instagram community to garner support and custom.
Things started well, really well, and we prided ourselves on offering only the very best beers, at the best prices, and sampling EVERY SINGLE ONE whilst taking a snazzy photo each time.
Unfortunately, post pandemic, people understandably had decisions to make about where they spent their money. This led to sales of our own premium products all but evaporating online and prices, in general, have continued to rise exorbitantly. Due to my day job restricting my ability to run markets and pop ups, cash flow became a problem and we lost our investor.
We have never taken a penny out of Chew & Brews, using income to offset costs and buy more stock. Unfortunately this restricted us and meant we cannot reasonably compete with the other big players in the game and our margins have been squeezed into non-existence meaning we now face the struggle of not being able to meet the costs involved in continuing to operate and have no more money to plow into it anymore
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