Advance Australian Manufacturing With Brunswick Aces
Starting life as a side hustle for five friends in the city’s inner-north who shared a love of food and drink, Brunswick Aces has grown into one of Melbourne’s most unique bars and distilleries, and carries the distinction of being Australia's first non-alcoholic bar.
Brunswick Aces Bar“We were all neighbours and became friends over a shared love of food and drink,” explains Brunswick Aces CEO Stephen Lawrence of the company’s genesis. “We would have dinner together, we'd have drinks together, then we started brewing some beer, fermenting some wine and eventually we got carried away. I built a still that we distilled some gin in, and then we'd have cocktail evenings together. That was the way we formed the group.”
“We produce alcoholic and non-alcoholic products because our ethos is all about making everyone feel welcome.”
With backgrounds in science, engineering, marketing and accounting, the team behind Brunswick Aces has seen some significant growth in a relatively short space of time. Stephen sits down with #AAM to share their story.
AAM: How would you compare your business now to pre-pandemic?
Stephen Lawrence: "When the pandemic hit, it really shifted our business into a different vertical. Sales and marketing became much more difficult given all of the restaurants and bars, and a lot of the shops that we were trying to sell into, were closing down or had restricted hours. We’d grown from the stills we built in a garage into a business where we were contract manufacturing with a larger distiller, so we very much focused on sales and marketing.”
“We wanted to continue the business, so we looked to kind of 'futureproof' ourselves, you know? Unlike a lot of other people who were getting out of facilities during that time, we actually rented a space – a warehouse on Weston Street in Brunswick East – and we built the facility during the pandemic.”
“That’s when we built our own stills – dedicated non-alcoholic stills – and we built the bar in the front, which we opened halfway through the pandemic as Australia's first non-alcoholic bar. It was a way of showing off not only what we do but what other people in the non-alcoholic drinks industry do – from beer producers to wine producers, to other spirit manufacturers.”
“We also started an online store to be able to access our customers directly when the lockdowns were on. And then, we upgraded all of our packaging, so we have a really beautiful new bottle, and our go-to-market strategy has shifted.”
“Unlike before the pandemic, we now manufacture our own product; we can do our own R&D, and it's enabled us to grow and export a lot sooner than we would have otherwise. So, through the struggle that was the pandemic, we've managed to turn some lemons into lemonade, I suppose."
What would you say have been the greatest challenges of the pandemic for your business as a manufacturer?
“From our perspective, the most difficult part was financing without the normal revenue streams coming through, particularly as a business in its infancy. Government help was there but it doesn't compare. And, particularly when that stopped, it was really, really challenging to find the right staff at the right numbers to keep things moving.”
Were there any unanticipated positives that came out of your experiences across recent years?
“You have to look for the positives, even in the darkest of times, and try to make something of it. Eventually, down the track, we could have built our own facility – we could have built our own bar – but, in reality, we wouldn't have if we hadn't been pushed to because of the lack of other opportunities during the pandemic.”
Founder Stephen Lawrence in the Brunswick Aces Distillery“We're not out of the woods yet, but we're certainly in a much stronger position. We have direct sales to our customers now via the bar and the online bottle shop and markets where we try to interact directly. I wouldn't choose for there to be another pandemic to come around too soon, but we like to think we made the most of the hand that we were dealt."
What does the future of manufacturing in Australia look like through your eyes?
“For me, the biggest thing is innovation. I think Australia has an amazing opportunity. Brunswick Aces is connected to an awful lot of startups due to being one ourselves, so we see the immense amount of creativity, bright ideas and innovation that come out of this place.”
“We really need to embrace that in manufacturing, you know? Sure, we can drag coal and minerals out of the earth that have seen us become a very affluent country, but I think the next phase for Australia is really embracing the grey matter as opposed to the black matter in the ground. That would be my direction [and] I'm really excited to be part of that.”
If you were to share some important advice with other Australian manufacturers, what would it be?
“Innovate. As I said, we saw that we had a challenge, like everyone else. We're obviously not going to know whether what we've done is effective for a little while yet but, if it is effective, then it will have been about our innovation, and about taking the challenge head-on, and making lemonade out of lemons instead of crying over the sourness.”
“Being able to change has been really important in the industry and for our friends, and our fellow entrepreneurs, and other people from businesses of all sizes. What we've seen is those that have been able to adapt to the challenges have been able to flourish, and those that haven’t are the ones that have suffered more.”
Find out more about Brunswick Aces: www.brunswickaces.com
The Brunswick Aces story is part of Integra Systems' Advance Australian Manufacturing (#AAM) initiative. Read all about it and see how you can participate.