It’s dry January and non-alcoholic beer is enjoying its buzz month. Athletic Brewing Co. is a Connecticut-based brewery that has quickly established itself as a leading craft brand in the non-alcoholic beer biz. Athletic Brewing recently closed $17.5M in Series B funding for growth-driving investments, and it recently came to light that some of the investors in the company are famous folks from athletes to chefs. According to Leeanne Griffin at the Connecticut Post:
Pro football stars J.J. Watt and Justin Tuck, cyclist Lance Armstrong, Momofuku restaurateur David Chang and TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie are backers for the quickly-growing Athletic brand. In about three years’ time, Athletic has outgrown its 12,000 barrel capacity at its Connecticut brewery and expanded to a new San Diego facility nearly 10 times the size.
Wow. Athletic Brewing now has brewhouse presence is both New England and California. To complement its expanding reach, Athletic Brewing also recently selected Crafted ERP to support its rapid growth and expanding business operations. Crafted ERP’s Brewery Software was built to meet the specific requirements of craft breweries both large and small. Built on Oracle NetSuite, Crafted ERP is an all-in-one brewery management software system that streamlines and automates many of the complex tasks and processes required to run a craft brewery. Like what?
Well, Crafted ERP is being served as a buffet of software management tools for: sales (distribution management to shipping chargers); brewery production (recipe management to tank readings); quality control (mobile brew logs to lab info); compliance (excise tax reports to license management); analytics (brewery specific KPIs, reporting and dashboards); and lots, lots more. What sold Athletic Brewing? From the press release:
“Using up to five different platforms previously, we knew we needed something more robust and were recommended to look into NetSuite,” said Bill Shufelt, cofounder of Athletic Brewing Co. “We needed a platform that could seamlessly integrate with our website while allowing for recipe management, multi-location brewing, inventory fulfillment, and more. NetSuite alone didn’t fit, but with Crafted’s brewery-specific functionality we were able to curate the solution to support Athletic Brewing’s aggressive growth strategy.”
With a heavy direct-to-consumer model and ability to ship to all 50 states, Athletic liked Crafted’s open API ability to form a full two-way integration with Athletic’s e-commerce platform, Shopify. The company anticipates significant time and resource savings by automating communication around fulfillment and shipping operations across locations. As mentioned, in addition to its Stratford, Conn. taproom, Athletic recently opened a production brewery in San Diego and will manage all operations of both facilities in Crafted ERP.
Pandemic be damned, Athletic Brewing is looking at 2021 as a big growth year. According to Bloomberg:
Shufelt sees 2021 as an expansion year. The beers are newly available in Canada, and by the end of the first quarter the brand will also be sold in the U.K., the European Union, and Australia. Based on fourth-quarter sales, he says that doing three times the company’s $15 million revenue “is a reasonable expectation.”
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