BrewDog co-founder James Watt has told M&C an international crowdfunding drive will follow the launch of its mini-bond.
Watt told M&C he is confident the company will hit its £25m target within a year. BrewDog launched the fourth round of its Equity for Punks programme in April and raised £5m in the first three weeks. With the tally standing at just under £8m yesterday the company launched a duel equity raise and mini-bond through Crowdcube.
He said he was happy with the rate of fundraising, saying: “Over the summer we’ve raised close to £3m so I wouldn’t exactly call that disappointing.
“This is a year-long campaign with a huge target of £25m and we always planned to have several peaks throughout that. You saw a lot of activity around the initial launch and now we are ramping it up again through Crowdcube. Later in the year we will be doing specific campaigns across Scandinavia because that’s a big area for us. There will be another one to coincide with our launch in Berlin.
“This was never going to be done in a couple of months and we knew we would have to reach new audiences so this is one more way of doing that.”
Watt insisted the company had no plans to seek private equity backing, adding: “Equity for Punks was about creating a completely new and alternative business model where the people that have a stake in BrewDog are as passionate about making great beer as we are. Just because we want to grow and reach as many people as possible doesn’t mean we have share the company with people purely motivated by profit.”
Watt said the company’s most recent opening in Brighton had been its busiest ever launch weekend.
He said: “That bar had been a long time in the making so a buzz had been created around it and I think we also had a lot of potential customers there anyway. We also learn a bit more with every site about how we can best market what we do and I think the team did a great job of getting people excited about what was coming.”
