CEO of Beer Brand Pinter – The UK's Fastest Growing Online Retailer – On The Strategy Behind Its Incredible 626% YOY growth

To kick off season 2 of the Lightning 50 growth hacking podcast, we sit down with  beer-enthusiast brand Pinter, who created a device that allows beer-lovers to brew fresh beer in the comfort of their own homes. Lauded as a more sustainable way to enjoy beer than ordering crates of bottles, the brand made Time magazine’s Top 100 Inventions of 2020 - and this year was crowned the winner of Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 list after reporting an incredible 626% growth rate.

In this episode, Caroline speaks to Ralph Broadbent, CEO of Pinter, who shares tons of fascinating insight into how the brand achieved such immense popularity in a couple of years, how it is maintaining growth in such challenging times, and how tech plays into their ongoing strategy.

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Transcript

Show Notes | Series 2, Episode 1 | Pinter

About our podcast

Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, is a bitesize podcast that gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.

About our guest

Launched in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic, Pinter created a device that allows beer-lovers to brew fresh beer in the comfort of their own homes. Lauded as a more sustainable way to enjoy beer than ordering crates of bottles, the brand made Time magazine’s Top 100 Inventions of 2020 - and this year was crowned the winner of Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 list with an incredible 626% growth rate. For this podcast, we spoke to Ralph Broadbent, CEO of Pinter.

Transcript highlights:

• “Fresh beer is the best beer - you can ask any brewer in the world - but until we launched Pinter you couldn’t easily get it at home. It’s crazy that you’d take a single-use container to work but throw away tens of bottles of beer a week because you can only get it bottled. Pinter is a step forward in sustainability in that sense as it’s the only beer in the world that comes through your letterbox. One fresh batch is the equivalent of 17 bottles of beer.”
  
  
• “It took us a few years to arrive at the concept, but one of the key things was making sure you could deliver it through a letterbox so you could be at work and still receive it. Companies spend hundreds of millions of pounds trying to deliver to people but you usually have to sign for it. Pinter can come all through the day without signature, so it’s a convenient e-comm solution. Historically beer hasn’t been a great e-commerce fit due to that; it’s been easier to go to the shop - but Pinter solves that.” 
  
  
• “A huge amount of work went into inventing the product in the first place, and customer appetite was already massive when we launched. Around 30 days after the launch we were included in a list of best inventions of the year, other press followed, and we were run off our feet from then on. We were ready for it - so I think the key thing was the amount of time spent on development.” 
  
  
• “We’re in our second full year but in the first we reached about £6M in revenue. In the last quarter of 2020 we had no stock at all. It was a lot to do in the time we did it in - and immensely difficult to operationally deliver. It was me and just a handful of other people at first and we were physically packing it ourselves, but in 15 months we had 211 staff. In the last year we’ve been focused on building a better business in all senses.”
  
  
• “A big challenge for us was we tried to do too much at the beginning. Our revenue was growing enormously but each thing we were doing could have warranted its own department, and we spread ourselves too thin. When we refocused as a business we restructured to build teams, outsourced manufacturing and dispatch - and held onto what was super important to us personally, like product development. One of the biggest learnings for us was realising we couldn’t do everything.”
  
  
• “We use Shopify and Klaviyo and get a single customer view powered by our software analytics - so the amount of insight we get about our customers is next level and these systems are massively helpful for that. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel on how we send emails or manage data, but make sure we are really adding value. For our case it’s customer service, and proving how to make the best beers possible with the best tools. We’ve also launched an app about making beer at home - keeping it simple and just focusing on what would benefit our customers.”
  
  
• “I used to run music festivals which have strong customer fan bases. With Pinter, something we didn’t see coming was that brewing pints sits at this crossroads between crafts and socialising. This social community just grew and is massively engaged. It’s been amazing for us as they’ve offered a huge amount of support and they really hold us to account to make sure what we do is world class. Without our community we wouldn’t have as strong a business as we do - they really are an invaluable resource.” 
  
  
• “Subscriptions allow you to get a better price on your beers - and they’re already competitively priced, so it’s a big saving on high quality beer. Subscriptions have increased a lot for us as a portion of our overall base. Early on, we didn’t have the ability to buy both products and subscriptions in one transaction - now that we do it’s gone a long way to contributing to our popularity.” 
  
  
• “We’re a young company, so everything is quite uncharted so far in terms of demand. Christmas is a super busy time for us for both new and existing customers, but we have a strong supply team and have built in lots of resilience. The World Cup is delayed this year so that will be another big event - most people won’t be going but will be watching it at home with friends. So it’s very difficult to forecast the effects of Christmas, this event and our natural growth this year. Forecasting is one of our biggest challenges for the coming season.”
  
  
• “This year has been the most difficult year for us as retailers - keeping everything together while we grow so fast and working ridiculous hours - so to get the number one spot in the Lightning 50 is awesome. You work hard seven days a week for so long, and it inspires you to carry on. It makes it all worth it.”

Top takeaways

●      Pinter topped the Lightning 50 of UK brands this year, winning fastest-growing e-commerce retail brand in the UK and the city of London.  

●       Despite only launching in 2020, the brand reached an impressive 626% growth rate YoY.

●      The tech they use to power their expansion includes Shopify, Klaviyo, Facebook Ads and a subscription payment model.

●     Pinter is the first product of its kind - and going live in the peak of the pandemic meant the product was perfectly placed for huge consumer interest.