Genevieve had two great interviews recently where she talks about what it's like to be a female founder and start a business in your basement.

A little entrepreneurship fodder for your weekend:

Shades of Entrepreneurship Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/founder-chief-marketing-officer-bitter-housewife-genevieve/id1552577775?i=1000528848564

Authority Magazine: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/female-founders-genevieve-brazelton-on-why-we-need-more-women-founders-and-the-five-things-you-a05e54166e2b

“As the industry (non-alcoholic beverages) continues to lap last year’s heightened pandemic-driven retail sales, non-alcoholic beverage sales remained ‘broadly elevated’.” (https://www.bevnet.com/news/2021/nielsen-non-alc-beverage-sales-remain-broadly-elevated)

The pandemic put a spotlight on overall health. With many of us slowing down, cooking at home, and paying more attention to how we felt, it became clear that what we put in our bodies affected our mental health as much as our physical health. 86% of Millennial and Gen Z populations value mental health to be as important as physical health (https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2021/06/22/Low-and-no-alcohol-How-holistic-health-is-propelling-the-trend#) and reducing or cutting out alcohol has a positive effect on both of these. 

Not only are consumers making choices that support their physical and mental health, but they’re also choosing to buy from companies that support their overall values. We created our Bitters & Soda to give consumers another option that fit the occasion of “having a drink” but that didn’t contain alcohol or sugar. But we also created a company that believes in the honest approach to everything - ingredients, process, and marketing.

We believe The Bitter Housewife is what many consumers are looking for, both as a beverage choice and a company to support.

- Genevieve & Dan

We've landed two great new locations for Bitters & Soda in the Seattle Area. 

PCC Community Markets, which has been carrying our cocktail bitters for a few years now, brought both flavors of Bitters & Soda into all locations. PCC is a highly curated, highly respected consumer-owned food cooperative that has been serving the Seattle area for close to 70 years and has 15 locations. It also happens to be the largest consumer-owned food cooperative in the United States.

Dahlia Bakery, a Tom Douglas restaurant, just reopened and offers both our Bitters & Soda and cocktail bitters. As restaurants across the city begin to reopen we hope to see many of our products featured on the menus of some of these iconic Seattle locations. Tom Douglas himself is quite a fan, hear for yourself on a recent episode of Hot Stove Society Radio Show - https://overcast.fm/+BJ0WHW3ZQ.

As cities across the country begin to reopen we expect to be adding many new stores and restaurants to our list of retailers. 

Cheers, 

Genevieve and Dan

First a little background on how StartEngine works. We don't get any investor's contact information until they are fully invested, meaning your investment has cleared escrow and we then request a disbursement of funds, asking all cleared investors for a final confirmation that they want to invest. 

We have done that for the first $100,000 invested and have just received our first list of official investors. Even though our goal is much higher than $100k we have a plan laid out for how we'll use each $100k invested to help our business grow. This means we won't be sitting around waiting to initiate plans until we get to some magical, pie in the sky number. 

This first traunch of funds will be primarily put toward packaging upgrades, we're working on a box for the 4-packs of Bitters & Soda to replace the plastic 4 pack holders. We're also in development on new shipping boxes for the Bitters & Soda to minimize shipping costs and damage, as well as make for a better customer experience. Increasing our ad spend over the summer to continue to grow DTC sales and upgrading our subscription email flows are also high priorities that will get tackled with this first installment. 

Requesting the money in phases also means we'll be able to manage the disbursement of perks in a way that doesn't sideline the business with inventory and fulfillment constraints or have all our investors waiting 6+ months to receive perks. We expect to be mailing out the first round, almost 100 investor perks, in the next two weeks, including this exclusive Bitterly Invested hat for the first round of investors!

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello!

As you might know, The Bitter Housewife has exceeded its minimum funding goal. When a company reaches its minimum on StartEngine, it's about to begin withdrawing funds. If you invested in The Bitter Housewife be on the lookout for an email that describes more about the disbursement process.

This campaign will continue to accept investments until its indicated closing date.

Thanks for funding the future.

-StartEngine

We take the question of our name and whether it's offensive or even the kind of business name that can succeed in a mainstream market very seriously. It comes up on occasion and prompted the first questions asked during the Test The Waters phase of this campaign. We have considered changing it. There have been many long discussions amongst Dan and myself, as well as with multiple advisors. 

The general consensus is this: We will never get 100% of the audience, regardless of how neutral our name is, so let's focus on the ones that get our mission, our general brand vibe, those who we can speak genuinely to. We can do that best by being who we are, not trying to be more pleasing to all. 

While we accept that some people will be offended by our name, the question has been raised that this may not be a sound business choice. I do hear that and it's a valid concern, but the fact that we potentially offend some people doesn't mean there isn't a sizable and very viable market out there that isn't offended and will sustain us as a profitable business. Our experience so far points to most people thinking our name is great. Just read some of the comments on this page for real customer's reactions. 

And to drive the point home a little further, I'll give you an example of whether or not a potentially offensive brand name can still be successful. I find the name and the overall concept of Skinny Margarita offensive. I think it's horribly condescending and the brand messaging is just gross, but I also recognize there is a very sizable market out there that thinks it's awesome and their sales prove it. I'm sure you can think of your own examples.

We actually had another brand that was very neutral called RAFT. We made both cocktail syrups and cocktail bitters and were sold in over 1200 stores nationwide. But that brand didn't sell any better than The Bitter Housewife when they were side by side on the same store shelf. When we presented our full catalog of products, meaning both brands, multiple buyers chose The Bitter Housewife over RAFT because they liked it and thought it stood out. Williams Sonoma, Neiman Marcus, Anthropology, and Nordstrom have all asked specifically for The Bitter Housewife.

So all this is to say, it's not that we don't take it seriously that our name offends some people. I do wish that everyone immediately understood the humor, playfulness, and the woman who is behind it. But we know we can't please everyone. No brand can. So as a business choice, we've decided to focus on the group of people who love the name and what we're doing. They will ultimately be the most loyal and give us the most potential and we truly believe there are enough of them to support the growth efforts of our company.

Cheers to being Bitterly Honest!

-Genevieve

We've talked about the growth of our DTC sales and they are certainly encouraging. But an even more encouraging number is our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), in other words, subscriptions. We started 2020 with $104 in MRR and ended the year at $1116. That's a regular thousand dollars of revenue coming in every month. As of May 26th, we're at $5261 in MRR, almost 5x so far this year. In 2021, we've seen an average monthly increase of 33% in MRR. 

This steady growth, with a minimal churn (canceled subscriptions) of 4% is significant. If we can continue this trend we are looking at significant predictable monthly revenue with a high margin. Our average lifetime value (LTV) is $69.72, however,  the LTV of subscribers is $1,292.

Side Note

There is a broad range of investors here with all sorts of experience levels. We try to present information we think is both interesting and straightforward. However, we want to encourage you to ask questions about anything we post or even ask us to dig a little deeper. 

Cheers, 

Genevieve and Dan

We've been testing and tasting for a few months now and our third flavor of Bitters & Soda should be available soon. What's it going to be??? Drumroll please....

Grapefruit

Perfect for summer sipping and a super popular flavor across the board. We actually hear from our customers that grapefruit bitters are the flavor they turn to most often when making bitters and soda at home. 

The cans should be arriving in a few weeks and we're doing some small focus group tasting to make sure we get the right amount of grapefruit taste and bitterness in the final product. Below is our super high-tech system for carbonating small batches - 5-gallon corny kegs. 

We plan to announce a drop for the first batch near the end of June for our subscribers and online customers. Then rolling it out to retail soon after that. 

- Genevieve and Dan

We love looking at the numbers, especially when they continue to show growth and momentum. Our online sales numbers don't disappoint and since the data on our campaign page is a few months old we wanted to share the continuing momentum with you. 

• Direct to consumer year to date (DTC YTD) sales are $90,371 compared to $95,271 for all of 2020.  

• DTC sales are now over 38% of our total sales as compared to 24% for 2020.

Having significant and growing online sales is exciting to us for three main reasons:

• cashflow from almost immediate payments
• proves demand is there for our products
• customer insights that help us to stand out in crowded retail 

With the investment from this campaign we plan to put even more energy toward growing this sales channel by: 

• improving the customer experience both online and with membership and referral program
• customer research to find out what we're doing right and how we can improve
• content creation to attract more customers that love what we're doing

Your investment helps us with all of this and more. 

- Genevieve and Dan