Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
We sat 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.
For this podcast episode, we spoke to Ralph Broadbent, CEO of Pinter, who shared tons of fascinating insight into how the brand achieved such immense popularity in a couple of years, how the business maintained growth in such challenging times, and how tech plays into their ongoing strategy.
Here are some of the highlights from the transcript…
- “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.”
- “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 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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
Want to hear more of what Ralph had to say? Catch up with the full episode, and subscribe to upcoming ones, here as well as all major podcast platforms – including Spotify, Amazon and Google.
