Kickstarting Our Quest

We’ve started looking for alternate spaces to move the brewery. And we started looking into potential avenues of funding. While we don’t have a specific place yet, nor know quite what we will need financially speaking to get another location setup for business, we do have ideas.

Our hope is to maintain some sort of presence in Leavenworth. However, spaces are not often available and when they are they tend to get snapped up pretty quickly, sometimes before you know it’s going to be available at all due quite deals behind the scenes. Additionally, rent has gotten very expensive, especially if you want to be up on Front St to benefit from the majority of walking traffic. Due to the cost, it seems prudent to maximize seating space if you are in Leavenworth and have the actual brewhouse located in a cheaper area. One possibility is something like brewing in a warehouse in Wenatchee and having a tasting room in Leavenworth. (We could put a couple homebrew buckets in the back as a token way of making it a “brewery” for the licensing.)

Alternatively, we have considered moving the whole situation down valley where it’s easier to find space and the space is more affordable. Of course, this means our market would change quite dramatically. We’d be trading tourists for locals and it’d be akin to starting a brand new business. So that idea is intimidating in its own right. And we recognize we’d probably lose a lot of our regulars and long time fans as we presume most of you are coming to Leavenworth primarily and wouldn’t expect you’d change up your trip to visit us in Cashmere or Wenatchee….perhaps occasionally, but probably not as often? We’d certainly miss visiting with you.

Funding will be key as well as it’s highly likely any alternative location will require significant remodeling to install the brew system (electrical, plumbing, ventilation, drainage.) As well as designing a tasting room space. We don’t have numbers for that yet as it will be location dependent, but we imagine we’ll need financial assistance. We’ve been talking to our investor and inquiring with our bank regarding potential loans or LOC we might qualify for in order to assess what our spending limit might be.

We’ve also started to toy with the idea of a Kickstarter (hence the title of this post). We aren’t sure how much traction it would gain with our fans especially as the economic scene has gotten tougher in the past couple years. But we have roughed out some thoughts on reward tiers and what it could look like if we were to try one. For donors, the handy thing about Kickstarter is that it is a “all or nothing” funding scheme. We’d make a funding goal amount and if donors pledged enough to meet the goal, then they’d be charged and we’d get funding, but if donors didn’t pledge enough and we fell short of the goal then no one pays out any money and we look for an alternative.

Or maybe some generous soul pops out of nowhere and makes it rain? We can dream!

We’ve added the ability to comment on posts now and would love to hear your feedback about relocation, especially any feedback regarding if you’d be interested in helping support a Kickstarter campaign and if so what sort of rewards do you think would be valuable to offer?

We are also looking to start doing some regular email newsletters to all the contacts we currently have on file as another way to keep you updated about Doghaus. If you would like to get on a email list, please head to the Contact page and shoot us a direct message!