EeBria

Market

Target market

The UK Beer market is worth at least £16.9bn (forecast to grow to £18.1bn in 2019). The European opportunity is worth £141bn and there is a further £66bn market opportunity in the USA.

Our initial focus is on the craft beer part of the market, worth approximately £650m in the UK, however our marketplace also caters for non-craft breweries and pubs.

Our main targets are:
- Independent pubs, and pubs in small chains (up to 10-15 pubs).
- Bottle Shops.
- Restaurants and cafes.

There are 59k pubs in the UK, and 88k premises with a full licence. We believe that our main targets represent approximately 30% of these premises.

We target pubs nationwide, as due to our innovative model, there is no area of the UK which is easier or cheaper for us to fulfil. We are able to work with all manner of business from pop-up events / small market stalls to large established chains, because we have a simple online user experience, flexible deliveries and crucially no minimum order size.

Characteristics of target market

The UK is going through a huge beer boom, with the number of breweries growing 10% for three consecutive years, bringing the current total to 1,424. Craft beer has been a key driving force behind this trend and at least 23% of all breweries produce keg craft beers (up from 19% last year).

We feel it's obvious for all to see that beer distribution hasn't developed with the market - there are even some distributors who can only take orders by phone. It is a highly fragmented market filled with a large number of distributors of various sizes, focusing on specific regions. We strongly believe that no distributor using a traditional model is able to match the range and nationwide coverage that we offer.

Nationwide distributors don't have the setup to be able to handle the relatively small, and regularly changing range of beers from smaller breweries. Whilst regional distributors struggle to offer a wide range of breweries or a varied range of stock.

Marketing strategy

From our B2C site, EeBria.com, we had strong established relationships with some of the best UK breweries, which we were able to capitalise upon for EeBriaTrade. Since launch, the brewery count has grown rapidly to over 100, with 44 in November alone, and with the vast majority of them approaching us.

We work with breweries of wide range of sizes from the very small, such as Northern Alchemy based in a shipping container, to large international craft breweries such as BrewDog. They each benefit in different ways from using our site, be it from accessing a large network of pubs, increasing their distribution range or increasing their revenue from their, often limited, beer production.

We acquire pubs through a wide range of channels. As we are doing something that is completely different to existing distributors, our key route to market is via our sales team. Speaking to pubs in person and on the phone gives us the best opportunity to explain our model, why it is a big improvement on their current provider and to convince them to try us. Once they make their first order most become regular customers. The average monthly spend per outlet has increased 15% monthly since June, with the speed of repeat typically increasing to fortnightly orders. As a result, recruiting a larger sales team, to enable us to contact more pubs is a key reason for this investment round.

Further to the sales team, we access pubs through a variety of other means including online and offline marketing.

By having a large nationwide network of breweries, we are also able to easily reach pubs all over the UK, through association, search and referrals.

Competition strategy

EeBriaTrade is a completely different approach to the beer distribution market, using technology to give us a wide range of benefits above our competitors, so we:
- Are cheaper for pubs.
- Pay breweries more.
- Offer a wider product range, of better and fresher beer.
- Provide a wider geographical reach for both breweries and pubs.
- Have flexible ordering and delivery, including no minimum order size (Ten orders of one keg is as economical as one order for 10 kegs).

Existing distributors are scared about how our approach will change the industry, to the extent that the founder of a small regional distributor even applied to work for us (with the intention of closing his business) as he saw our approach as an important shift in the market, which in the long term would make it very difficult for him to compete. Further to this a national distributor is known to regard us as "potential serious competition". Distributors are seeing what we're doing as a threat to their way of working.