What is EeBria?

EeBria is a disruptive new approach to craft alcohol distribution in the UK.

Powered by our bespoke tech platform we operate EeBria.com selling craft beer to individuals, and EeBriaTrade.com sells to pubs, shops, bars and restaurants nationwide.

Operating as a marketplace, EeBria puts the producers in control of their products and listings, taking a small percentage of each sale. Brewers set the prices, while we do the rest, arranging delivery of beers, ciders, wine and spirits, via our fulfilment network and handling all payment processing and customer support. This unique approach means that the brewers are in control, they get paid more for their beers than through traditional wholesale channels, are able to send their beers nationwide and pubs have no restrictions on who they can buy from. This means pubs can get better value, better beer which ultimately benefits all drinkers!

In April 2017, due to our unique business model, EeBria was named in a Profitero/Nielsen report as one of seven alcohol "global initiatives that should be on everyone’s radar screen" alongside Amazon, Deliveroo, Heineken, BrewDog, Lidl and Pernod Ricard.

Who are EeBria?

The whole team at EeBria are hugely passionate about great craft beer and ensuring as many people as possible get to try it.

David Jackson, CEO and Co-founder

David founded EeBria in Jan 2013 coming from an eCommerce background as the former Head of Operations and Online Marketing Director at viagogo. Before that he was a strategy consultant at PwC.

Rachael Jackson, FD and Co-founder

Co-founder of the business with David, Rachael is a chartered accountant who after qualifying as an auditor with KPMG has headed up finance departments for multinational SMEs.

James Lousada, Board Advisor

James is the former CEO of Carlsberg UK and now works at Conviviality, owners of Matthew Clark, one of the UK's largest beer distributors.

Martijn van Buuren, Board Advisor

Martijn is the former On-Trade Director for Diageo. Both Martijn and James bring a wealth of industry experience, knowledge and contacts to the team.

Matt Stokes, Business Development Manager

An experienced sales professional, Matt manages our EeBriaTrade Sales Team comprising of Elliot, Ryan, Pedro and Chris (also our Saturday Taproom Manager).

Mark Sandberg, Head of Operations

Mark and Will ensure that our customers get great service and their beers as quickly as possible, and work with our brewery partners to keep us at the cutting edge of craft beer.

Harry Overs, Head of Tech

Harry formerly worked with David at viagogo and now ensures our platform keeps improving and remains market-leading.

Where did the idea come from?

Every start-up or entrepreneur is expected to be able to pinpoint their lightbulb moment in a snappy story that explains why they gave everything up to focus on their big idea. The EeBria story has always felt a bit more complicated than that to us, however...

In a nutshell, the founders liked beer, loved discovering new breweries, and were increasingly frustrated that there were new craft breweries popping up around the country and it was next to impossible to get their hands on their beers.

They knew that for the brewers they lived near they could get access to the brand new releases and the freshest beers and they also paid a lot less when they popped into the brewery on foot to buy their bottles to takeaway or drink in. You also enjoy the connection with the brewer and the love and care that goes into every bottle (it was pretty much all bottles, not cans then). They realised that this was the best way to get beer - direct from the producers.

The only problem was that was hard to do if you wanted beer from a brewery in Scotland or Cornwall and you were based in London, or visa versa. Even looking online there were few options. The breaking point was a new brewery that were gaining rave reviews and we're only 5 or so miles away, yet there was only one pub in the country selling it. They realised there was no reason why technology and some clever courier partnering couldn’t solve all these issues and give brewers a single online presence for people to go to where they could access the freshest, most exciting and in demand beers and get the delivered from the source to their home… EeBria was born.

What's the name all about?

The question we’re probably asked most about the business as founders is where did the name come from?

There are two stories to this, the one we had when we came up with the name, and the additional part we've added to the story after a wordsmith told us he loved the name and gave us the reasons he liked!

• EeBria was chosen because it means tipsy in Esperanto, a language we turned to (admittedly not the first language we turned to) so that we didn’t inadvertently choose something offensive in another language which make it difficult when entering other countries.
• As an added bonus the first 4 letters of the name can be rearranged to say beer
• More accurately, the real meaning or origins of the word EeBria is from the latin for ‘drunk with love’
• And finally the most practical is that the URLs were available to purchase, and cheap, at the time we were looking to set up the business…

Our Mission

Our starting mission was simple: make it easier to buy good beer online.

Over the years as the business has evolved and we’ve grown we still stick to strong principles about what we’re trying to achieve and what we stand for:

• Get more people drinking better beer
• Support craft beer made with care and attention of talented and committed individuals
• Create a fair marketplace so those brewers get a fair cut of the ultimate sale price
• Put the control back into the brewers hands, let them set the prices, describe their beer and store it safely
• Seek out new breweries doing exciting new things
• Help small and start up breweries or brewers in the far flung edges of the country reach a larger national market
• Don’t settle for the bland or the boring
• Sell the hottest new releases and the best rated beers the country has to offer
• Help people find their new favourite brewery or beer, and make sure they keep discovering and trying new things
• Drink great beers

Why are we great?

Well, we're a totally different type of nationwide craft beer and cider distributor, representing over 300 of the best breweries from across the UK and abroad, with that number growing all the time.

Unlike other distributors, we operate entirely online and use a unique marketplace model, putting the control back into the hands of the people who made the beer in the first place and getting them, and you, a fairer deal.

We don’t have a warehouse as everything sold on EeBriaTrade is listed and priced by the breweries and then shipped directly to you from the brewery, using our own nationwide distribution network. We handle all the logistics and customer service and we think it's frankly better than the traditional models you might be used to.

EeBriaTrade, our platform for bars pubs and restaurants, offers:

• The widest range of craft beer of any distributor in the UK – We work with well over 300 breweries and we currently have over 2,000 active SKUs, much more than any other distributor. There’s always a beer to suit your needs or tastebuds, and you can use our preference tools to help us recommend the perfect beer for your customers.
• Great prices, as our efficient model means we have minimal costs, making prices similar to buying direct from the brewery and typically cheaper than other options.
• We provide access to very small batch beers and rare breweries. Our model also means that geography is no barrier, whether you're looking for something local or you're based in Cornwall and looking for some beer from the Orkneys, we can help move beer nationwide in keg, can and bottle.
• Very low admin – Everything is automated so you order all the beers online with a few clicks and you'll get just one invoice regardless of how many breweries you’ve ordered from and recommended new beers based on what you've bought from us before.
• We sell the freshest possible beer, in the best possible condition as it's not been mistreated in a warehouse by a third party, but has been looked after at it's source. We also have pre-release sales where you can buy a beer due to be shipped the very same day it's kegged, perfect for the hoppiest beers.
• Exciting new beers– Whether it’s great new beers from our awesome UK breweries, or international beers through relationships with carefully picked importers, we are constantly adding amazing new beers. We currently offer beers from many countries, including the USA, Italy, France, Ireland, Estonia, Greece with more due soon and we make sure that our beer list is at the forefront of the craft beer scene.

The Future

EeBria has a lot of options for the future, in the main we simply want to continue growing the business on it’s current trajectory, building on our reputation so we’re the natural one stop shop and leading voice in the UK craft beer scene.

However there’s more in the works than just selling more beer. We truly believe that the EeBria marketplace model is the smartest and simplest way to sell craft beer and there’s no end to where we can go with it.

Our model is scalable as we let our technology do the heavy lifting so we don’t have to. We can ‘hold’ more stock than any warehouse based competitor can dream of (currently over £21m and 17,000 cubic metres) and our website and national courier partners can handle incredible volumes without blinking an eye. As well as the individual consumer market we serve with EeBria.com there are huge volumes of trade customers we can work with on EeBriaTrade.com, with everyone from large chains to independent restaurants and bars buying beer and other drinks for increasingly discerning customers.

There are more than 1,500 breweries in the UK and while we work with more than 300 of them (May '17) there’s plenty still who haven’t joined the EeBria revolution. We want to be the natural launch pad for competent new UK breweries who deserve to get their beers out to market across the country, no matter their humble beginnings. We want to continue to be the exclusive seller of the hottest new beers and special pre-release sales, but also be the place customers can come to find precisely the right beer for their pub or to drink at home, no matter what their taste and style.

Outside of the UK we want to open up the borders for UK brewers so they can export products to the continent without lots more admin hassle and legalese. We want to work with more importers and open up the marketplace to brewers from further afield to increase the range we can offer in the UK. And we have the potential to launch the EeBria model inside any other country where the craft beer scene has the appetite and the breweries to support us.

Why Crowdfunding?

First, in case you’re less familiar with the term, what is crowdfunding? Crowdfunding in our case is raising investment from the public in exchange for equity investment in the business (in other words selling part of the business to get money to enable us to put our plans into action).

Like any other equity investment, in exchange for money to fund and grow the business, investors receive shares in the business that allow them to partake in any dividend profit distributions in the future or potentially make a profit on the sale of those shares if the company sells or floats on a stock market at some point at a later date.

(Of course share investment has its risks and not all investments work out that way - please read the guidance on the crowdfunding websites around capital at risk!)

Finding investment funding for a new idea and business is hard and many early fledgling businesses now go to the crowd to raise money for their new idea and also to prove that other people agree with their vision and help them establish a market truly exists for their product or service.

In EeBria’s early stages, ‘the crowd’ was hugely important for building us. Crowdfunding allowed us to seek the support from our personal networks in a more formal and low value way, as well as find a bigger pool of people who shared our sense that the EeBria model was really onto something in an exciting industry space.

We’ve been back to the crowd a couple of times since then, as we have a wide network of people who are interested in supporting the business, and we’ve successfully raised money from brewers and customers as well as high net worth investors. As well as giving us the money we needed to take the business from a true start up, hiring a larger team and taking on a bigger office space, our crowd investors are all brand ambassadors, sharing the EeBria idea amongst their own networks and contacts. In some cases our investors have introduced us to customers, trade partners and have been useful sources of advice or support.

We’ve chosen to stay with the crowd again in 2017 as we find that what EeBria is trying to do still resonates with people in general. With craft beer becoming more mainstream there are increasing numbers of people getting into beer, many of whom are interested in being a part of the market, and owning a little piece of it themselves.

We have decided to work with Crowdcube for this funding round as they have a well established crowd in the craft beer space, having done raises in the past for the likes of BrewDog, Camden Town, Wild Beer, Redchurch, Hop Stuff and many, many more - an exciting group to be listed alongside.

Crowdfunding has been critical for EeBria reaching the size it has today and will continue to fund us into the future into breakeven and then beyond. It’s great to have the support of so many people, not just as customers and partners but also as fellow owners of the business all sharing our passion for great beer and believing in what we do.