Charlie McVeigh, the managing director of Draft House, has told M&C Report the London-based craft beer bar operator will “continue to break records” after reporting double-digit sales increases.
Despite not opening any pubs in the year to 26 October 2014, the company saw sales up 17.5% to £4.8m with like-for-like sales ahead 7.4%. In the four months to February like-for-likes have risen 10.6%.
McVeigh said the latest additions to group – Columbia Road and Hammersmith – had both seen a flying start and he expected to announce another acquisition within weeks.
He said: “Columbia Road has been quitter than we expected early week but the weekends are absolutely flying. We just keep on breaking records. We had an absolutely crazy Sunday, which smashed the previous record. I think records are going to continue to fall.
“Hammersmith is exactly the opposite. It loves a cold raining week. The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a challenge but we have been very pleased with its overall performance.”
He said the company was now on track to deliver continued success, saying: “Since October 2013 we seem to have gone from strength to strength and now I think we’re going all the way.
“2013 was transformational in the sense that we started to get the standards right and we saw the performance of sites like City and Seething Lane really taking off and that flowed through into the year ending Oct 2014. We saw consistent good like-for-likes. We started to improve the calibre of people working for us. A lot of that is down to Richard Peachman, our ops guy, who has done a great job in dragging the standards up. It takes a while for customers to notice that but when they do you can really see the impact.
“Things like the launch of Bump Caves gave us something to talk about on the spirits front, then we started distributing the Bump Caves infused spirts and now doing the pre-mixed optic cocktails. That has made a great difference because we weren’t that good at spirits before and now we are.
“Embarrassingly we weren’t that good at cask ale either and we have got really good at that in the past few years.”
He said this summer would see the introduction of the Bump Summer Cup – which he described as a “psychedelic Pimms’.
