It’s been a whirlwind of a year in gin.
The concept for [Prototype] gin was born in 2021, but it’s been a long journey of research, rethinks and straight-through-the-night work sprints to get to where we are today.
Here's looking back at our journey...
Early Thoughts & Trials
Looking back (honestly) at our journey over the last year is something that seems natural at the beginning of a brand new year. What did we achieve? What did we miss? What do we wish we could have done differently or what do we want to have had another go at?
There’s so many answers to these questions, and it’ll change as time goes on and we realize what’s important. But for now, we can say with honesty what we are happy with and what we are sad with.
The first couple of months of 2022 was filled with testing, trials, ideas and changes. We spent a lot of time just looking and learning. In my view, this activity is underestimated.
I may not have made anything at the end of the day but I have learnt things that will help me make decisions and be productive later on. Now I can see that this activity helped me six, eight, ten months later.
Bottle Caps & Battle Hats
After running around New York State like a couple of lunatics - battling with the elements, the lack of time and Independence Day weekend traffic - we decided to base our production in the United Kingdom. But that’s just the first of many steps in our story.
Once we knew what we wanted to make, we needed to find the right person to make it. After hours and hours of research - done over several weeks - we made our decision to use a distillery based west of London.
It’s an important call to make and we know we made the right one.
Open to experimentation but absolutely focused on quality, this award-winning distillery has been our greatest asset and we couldn’t be happier. They lead us into making our best decisions, from label shapes to bottle caps, and are an absolute pleasure to work with.
Growing Up
Finally, we come to the hard part. Building our business. After all, now we have our gin, we have to sell it, right?! Queue hours and hours of sweating over websites, of building our look and feel, of developing good content, of choosing between color codes and typography styles.
If you’ve never rewritten a branding document at 3am you’ll never know the sweet joy of finding that exact right word - but then rewriting it all over again the next day because you think it’s just not quite as perfect as that first attempt you had before your third coffee (spiked with gin for inspiration).
With more and more experience, more highs and more lows, more failures and more achievements, you learn to enjoy the ride. After all, it’s why we’re here, isn’t it?
So let's raise a gin cocktail to our successful first year for [Prototype] Gin !
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