FireRoot

Thanks for the input Jason! Our current location is slightly off the beaten path in Montana, so it's not worth doing the tasting room here. We have an orchard on-sight and distill everything from apples, so it works great for that, but we don't get the traffic. That is why we are looking into opening something in our nearest "city". However, the nearest city, "Missoula" only has 70,000 people and three distilleries. We still could get a lot more exposure and I really like some of the points you made like finding brand ambassadors. We found a location that has about 20,000 cars that drive by everyday. How many of those people do you think we could expect would come in to a tasting room?

We hired a sales team that took 10% of all our distribution sales for the state. We are in a control state, so everything is distributed through the state warehouse and sales people are separate. Unfortunately, they didn't really do anything for us. They have a portfolio with other brands and we didn't see a single new account open up, but we still had to pay them the 10% from the accounts we had previously opened. We had a short contract and once that ended my wife and hit the road and tippled our sales ourselves. However, we cant be on the road all the time, so we are looking at getting brand ambassadors around the state. Anybody have brand ambassadors? Do you pay them a percentage of your sales and if so how much?

We would probably be looking at close to a $1 Million for a tasting room in town. We would have to distill on-sight, so it's basically building a second distillery. We could do fermentations, stripping runs, and storage at our current facility so we wouldn't need as much space in town. However, it would cost a lot of put in a distillery in a good location. We can get a loan, but it would seem really sketchy to get a loan to further just the distribution marketing. A tasting room in a good location will definitely make sales, so it doesn't seem like as big of a risk. What are your thoughts?

I am hoping to re-open this discussion. Fist I will describe our current situation: We established our distillery with only a distribution model and have been distributing for a little under a year. We distill on our farm which is good for manufacturing, but our location sucks for a tasting room (hence the distribution model). Our sales are starting to gain a little momentum and we are currently only distributing in our state. We have no debt, which is a huge plus. However, sales are slower than we'd like and we're not making enough money to live on yet. We are wondering if you think it's worth taking on investors/going into debt to build a tasting room in our nearest city? Do you think the marketing you gain from a tasting room is worth it, or does it really increase your sales that much? We are afraid that without a tasting room our brand will get left in the dust with all these other distilleries popping up that have tasting rooms. Or if we distribute out of state or out of country then maybe a tasting room doesn't even matter. Any advise on the situation is greatly appreciated.