We learned a lot from our first release in February, so we’re making a few changes. Please read on to find out how we’ll be doing things for our second release.
1. Bots
There are bots out there scanning for live links of whisky releases, meaning bottles sold online may not hang around for long – as we found out! We understand this has left some of our supporters feeling frustrated that they didn’t get much of an opportunity to buy a bottle. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about this, but we will continue to focus on making great whisky!
2. Investor priority
Some of our investors (who each invested £10,000+) are entitled to ‘priority access’ to future online releases. In addition to this, our other investors and our mailing list will get advance notification of our future online releases – this doesn’t guarantee securing a bottle but will be a heads up of releases going live.
3. Mailing list priority
After our major investors, our mailing list subscribers will be amongst the first to hear about our whisky releases. To make sure you don’t miss our emails, make sure your signed up with your current email address and add us to your contacts, so that our e-mails don’t hit your junk! Please also let us know what your email preferences {LINK} are, if you haven’t already. Once the release goes live we will send a link to the live product to make life easy for you.
4. Our whisky has ended up on auction sites
We’re alarmed by the number of bottles of our whisky that appeared on auction sites (within days of release). This isn’t what we want for our whisky, and we tried to discourage flipping by limiting online purchases to 1 bottle per person. In the future, we’ll be scanning very carefully for multiple purchases on our limited releases and all such attempts will be fully refunded (subject to a 2.5% admin fee to cover our card merchant costs).
5. Shipping to the EU
For our followers in the EU, our apologies but we’re still in discussions with EU distribution partners about how we get our whisky to you (in relatively small quantities). For release #2, we can only deliver to UK addresses. This can include mail forwarding services (at your own risk), such as www.forward2me.com Some have already successfully used this service for our spirits.
6. Click & collect
We still have quite a lot of paid for, but uncollected bottles. This is a headache as we’re not set up for ‘private storage’, and all the following-up has been very time consuming for our small team. As a result, we won’t be offering click & collect for this next release. Purchases can be made online for delivery, or from the Distillery shop in person (we can’t reserve bottles).
7. Remote orders
There are just a few of us and we don’t have a call centre large enough to manage orders over the phone, or via email or social media. Please don’t try and bribe us with pork pies, or sob stories of running out of fuel – we just need to have a hard line on this (sorry).
We’ll be sending more information to our mailing list subscribers about our second release soon – make sure you’re subscribed to be in the know! Sign up here.