Meet Horse Guards London Dry Gin Ltd
Posted on 22nd December 2021 at 12:35
We meet Katie from Horse Guards London Dry Gin Ltd, based in Maidenhead to find out more about the business and plans for the future.
Tell us a bit about Horse Guards London Dry Gin Ltd.
We've got quite an interesting story. Sitting in a quintessentially British pub in the Oxfordshire countryside, back in 2018, our founders were discussing a new initiative to revive lapsed trademarks, and sipping G&Ts (of course). As gin aficionados, their eyes were drawn to an old-fashioned bottle of gin behind the bar.
According to the barman, it was a historic brand which had disappeared over the years. The comment couldn’t have been more timely or fortuitous. Horse Guards Gin had indeed been a premium gin brand in the 1960s but the distillery had closed and a much loved brand and trademark had disappeared. The time had come to start producing rather than consuming!
After many rounds of creative product development, with the involvement of a leading Mixologist, the current blend of Horse Guards London Dry Gin was born in Bray, Maidenhead.
Today we are a multi award winning spirits producer, with a pink gin (raspberry and cranberry) and a Caribbean blended rum also in the stable.
Lockdown was tough on everyone, how did your business cope?
Lockdown was terrible for so many local businesses, and our work with the on trade (pubs and restaurants) effectively dried up overnight. So many were great customers.
We turned our sights to online sales and events, running many virtual cocktail making parties for groups of friends, and corporates, and promoting delivery of our products from online sales via our website.
What are your plans for the business?
The grant from the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead will be instrumental in taking our marketing to the next level. We have plans to enhance our POS displays, including those at locals events, and to enable us to provide activation resources to the local bars and restaurants that we supply to.
We hope that all residents will not only see our products in local venues, but will also enjoy drinking out of Horse Guards Gin glasses for example!
What would your advice to other businesses be?
We have found several of the training sessions provided by the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead and the local Chamber of Commerce informative and inspirational and would encourage all local businesses to find out what similar resources are available to them to assist them to grow and develop.
Small businesses in particular often require a broad set of skills from a small workforce, so training and development is always key.
How to support your local business
Horse Guards Gin offers 20% off all our award winning London Dry Gin and Raspberry and Cranberry Pink Gin to all RBWM residents. Applies to all bottle and boxed sets. Mention Advantage Card when purchasing.
Tagged as: Case study, Maidenhead
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