Curiouswines.ie, Supported by Linked Finance lenders in late 2014. How have things been since then @CuriousWines?

 

 

Expanding from one to two warehouses sounds simple but the reality was a lot of work on infrastructure and processes to facilitate scale, and the significant growth we feel we can achieve with the business. Curious Naas is more than just a photocopy of our Cork warehouse, it’s a state of the art distribution centre for our online and wholesale businesses, as well as our flagship retail store as we look ahead to repeating the process in the future.

 

We got there though, and the Linked Finance funding was invaluable. We opened in July and, I’m delighted to say, with a seamless transfer of distribution duties from Cork. The bonus was knocking a whopping 40% off our distribution costs with the more central location nationally, which will really start to pay back as we continue to grow.

 

The retail side of the business started slowly but by early autumn we had more than enough regular faces to go into Christmas with a lot of confidence, and so it proved. Overall we were over 50% up in year-on-year sales across both warehouses for the Christmas period, with online sales nearly double for December, so we were thrilled with that and it really validated our research on the second location.

 

Our next focus is giving Cork a bit of facelift. It’s been a bit neglected in the last year and is starting to look very much like the poor relation to the shiny new Naas, so we’ll be back to Linked Finance for some help with that. Watch this space!

 

Michael Kane, owner of Curiouswines.ie.