Client Spotlight: ShinDigger Craft Beer

What a great story of entrepreneurship – we love being involved with start-ups and helping them grow. What we are even more pleased about is that Shindigger uses Unleashed as their craft brewery software!

What does your business do?

Essentially ShinDigger brews beer. However, we have a slightly different model compared to other breweries in the UK. We are a ghost brewery, which means we brew our recipes on other breweries kits. When we started 3 years ago this was out of necessity. As too skint graduates getting the £60-100k loan we needed to properly set up a brewery of our own was near impossible! We’re not planning on changing this model for the foreseeable future though, we’ve grown to love the way to do things – it allows us to focus on the product rather than being in the product. [embed]https://vimeo.com/115658974[/embed]

What’s one of your favorite products?

We brew beers that we would like to drink. That is: flavorsome, refreshing and sessionable. We’re really proud of our core range of beers, but we’re now experimenting with adding fruit to give it that extra summary vibe - this is something I’m really excited about. So my favorite at the moment would be our Session IPA with Peach “Everything’s Peachy!”. The perfect beer garden accompaniment!

Why do you think your customers like this product so much?

Our beers have been received really well. I think this is because our core customer target is people like ourselves, so it’s much easier to imagine what they want!

Can you give us a brief history of your business and the growth it has experienced so far?

ShinDigger was born whilst George and I (Paul) were living together at Manchester University. We jointly invested our spare cash into a home-brewing kit. The beers were brewed in the kitchen and fermented in the basement of our student house. We soon began selling our beer at house parties. It was here the first seeds of ShinDigger were planted. In Autumn 2013, armed with a small loan from the government we started delivering kegs to bars around Manchester out the back of Paul’s banged up hatchback. Since then we’ve sold over 0.5m pints and at the moment producing are around 35k pints per month. Our beers are distributed as far North as Aberdeen and as far South as London and we’re even shipping beer over to Hong Kong!

How is Unleashed helping your business grow?

We have quite a simple answer to this, Unleashed frees up a lot of time to focus on the parts of the business that are really key to our growth – mainly making our product best it can be and also working out how we can get it in front of more people.

What is a particular problem that Unleashed has solved?

Before we started working with the Unleashed and Xero combo, we were working off a number of homemade spreadsheets to try and keep track of our business. Whilst this can work for tiny start-ups, as soon as we started to grow, we knew we needed something more scalable, accurate and easy to use. Unleashed means that our accounts and inventory are accurate and provides a number of fail-safes to prevent us from making mistakes. It also just makes everything 100x easier for us to manage and scale the company as we add new employees.

Is there an interesting customer story you could share with our readers?

I don’t know about funny for us, but being so young and owning a brewing company means that we regularly get ID’d buying our own beer, normally paying 5x what it cost us to make it!

Is there something you are particularly excited for your business right now?

We’ve got loads of awesome ideas in the pipeline – we’ve recently launched the events side of our company, ShinDigger Sessions, which was a huge hit on our debut event. Over 500 people coming through the door and having an amazing time! We’ve also got a direct delivery service on the way We’ll be revealing more about that soon though!

Is there something your business in particularly proud of?

We’re a brewery that’s trying to push the boundaries of what a brewery can be or do. We came into the industry as two 22-year-old students not really knowing anything. We still don’t know much, but that’s turned out to be our biggest strength. Now we have a sustainable business we’re now putting into place our plans to start pushing the boundaries of what a brewery can be and in the process creating more awesome products and experiences for our customers!