33% off everything until midnight March 13th
We’re launching our biggest sale ever because the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had has landed at our feet. You can now get a massive 33% off our entire web shop until midnight March 13th, essentially £1.50 worth of beer and merch for every £1 you spend. If your order is enough to hit our reward tier levels, you’ll get access to some amazing exclusive goodies too. We’re also offering trade discounts across selected lines for bars and bottle shops.
We’ll get orders out ASAP, however, this could take a little longer than usual. We’ll work through orders on a first come first served basis so don’t hang around!
Help us build our new brewery
We have the chance to build our next brewery - a location we can own, not rent, somewhere that’s 7 times the size of our current space with the opportunity to grow our brewing capacity to 20-times our current output. In short, it’s a dream come true, it secures Vault City’s future as a truly independent brewery, but we need your help.
The timing of this opportunity is perfect in a lot of ways, and not so perfect in others…
We’re at the limit of our current production space, beyond the limit really, relying on multiple external warehouses for incoming and outgoing storage and paying a pretty penny for the space and logistics of moving beer three times. We want to be in the best financial position possible when we make the move, and that can be difficult as a totally independent business.
We’re looking to raise £250,000 and we’re launching our biggest sale ever across our web shop and trade store to help make that a reality. We’ve always done our best to be as transparent as possible when it comes to Vault City, and in this blog, we wanted to make it clear why we’re doing things this way.
Why not crowdfund?
The market for crowdfunding isn’t what it used to be, but this is still a perfectly viable option, so why didn’t we do this? It comes down to time. The opportunity to buy our next location came at short notice, we need to finalise everything in March. That means we need to get cash quickly, and don’t have the time to get a traditional crowdfunder off the ground.
Why not take external funding?
To start with, it’s too short notice. Even if we wanted to go down this route, this opportunity has landed in our lap right now and it’s on a deadline. Any loan we get at this short notice would be a bad one, and it’s not the way we want to start things off in our new home.
Over and above that, remaining independent feels like the best way to stay true to ourselves and the things we stand for. That’s not to say we’d never go down this route, like many breweries we look up to, but it’s not a decision we’d rush into. We’d want to ensure complete autonomy over the high quality of our beer and the decisions we make as a business; like being a real living wage employer, offering a 4-day work week or having free health and dental care to all employees.
What about vouchers?
Offering vouchers are a great way to give customers a good deal and to get cash in the bank. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it comes with a catch. Unredeemed vouchers can appear as a ‘liability’ on the balance sheet, and this could affect what we can borrow in the future as we get set up at our new location. For this project, we’ve decided to focus on the selling the beer we’ve already got.
Just get a mortgage?
We are, actually, we’re in the process of applying, however, we’ll not have the funding in place in time. Doing things this way allows us to purchase the property outright, re-mortgage and then free up the cash to fit the place out.
Is this just a good excuse for a fire sale?
Not at all, we’ve been overproducing for the past 6 months. Our growth over the past 4 years indicates that we’ll run out of beer this summer if we don't overproduce through winter (we don’t have the same worries about freshness or short dated stock as our IPA-producing brothers and sisters), but we now need to cash in on the stash a tad earlier than expected. Vault City has been a profitable business since year one, with your help we can secure our future for decades to come.
Reward tiers.
For our web shop customers, we’re giving you 33% off our entire store until March 13th, plus we’re offering exclusive goodies if your order value hits our reward tier levels below:
£150 spend – A ticket to our launch party when we settle in to our new home in 2025, plus an exclusive Vault City beer brewed on our new site will be available to you as a freebie on us.
£200 spend – A ticket to our launch party when we settle in to our new home in 2025, plus an exclusive Vault City beer brewed on our new site will be available to you as a freebie on us (excluding shipping), plus your name etched into our forever home.
£500 spend – Okay, this is a lot of beer to buy, so we want to make it special. The first 7 people to hit this tier will all have the opportunity to collaborate on a joint beer with us and join us for the brew day with a plus 1. Plus a ticket to our launch party when we settle in to our new home in 2025, plus an exclusive Vault City beer brewed on our new site will be available to you as a freebie on us (excluding shipping), and of course your legendary beer name etched into our forever home.
