Drafts queued for the team. Approve to schedule, or edit inline. Posts published in the last 30 days have brought 9 inbound accounts into the pipeline.
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SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn
Breakage rates on glass: what the carriers do not want you to know
Breakage rates on glass: what the carriers do not want you to know.
Royal Mail Tracked 48: 0.9%.
Yodel: 2.4%.
Generic 2-man pallet: 0.3%.
But the cost-per-breakage is not just the unit. It's the customer service time, the replacement-and-refund double-touch, the Trustpilot review, the lost lifetime value.
We model breakage at £19 per incident — well above the £6.50 wholesale cost of the bottle.
If you're a drinks brand and the only number you look at is unit shipping cost, you're missing 80% of the picture.
PKPriya·Drinks·LinkedIn
Why every drinks DTC brand should be calculating bottle-weight contribution
Every drinks DTC brand should be calculating bottle-weight contribution.
A 750ml bottle weighs ~1.3kg packed. Three bottles tips you into the next carrier bracket. AOV jumps from £42 to £58, but shipping cost rises by 60p.
Most brands stop there. The smart ones look at gross-margin-per-order — and they realise the customer who buys six bottles is twice as profitable as three buyers of one bottle each.
Marketing for AOV. Pricing for bracket. Fulfilment for actual contribution.
We have brands doing this and brands that haven't started. The gap between them grows every quarter.
SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn
The new HMRC excise audit window: what drinks brands need to know
The new HMRC excise audit window kicks in this autumn.
If you ship duty-suspended stock and you cannot reconcile every movement against a registered bonded warehouse, you are in trouble.
The brands that survive this are the ones with proper W6/W8 reconciliation built into the pick process. The brands that don't are the ones still tracking it in a spreadsheet next to the despatch sheet.
We've helped two distilleries clean theirs up this quarter. The third is mid-audit and ringing us hourly.
If you're a UK distiller or alcohol importer, this is the deadline that matters.
PKPriya·Drinks·Blog
Bonded warehousing for DTC drinks brands: what changes after £1m turnover
Draft: 1,400-word blog on bonded-warehouse mechanics for drinks DTC at scale. Covers W6/W8 documentation, audit triggers, the practical cost of registering. Specifically for distillery and wine-importer founders. Anchors the new HMRC excise post (sam-drinks-excise).
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SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn·20 May
Carrier consolidation by region: the move drinks brands keep ignoring
Carrier consolidation by region: the move drinks brands keep ignoring.
Most drinks brands use 2-3 carriers and split shipments by weight. Smart move on cost. Terrible move on customer experience.
We've found that consolidating to one carrier per postcode region (not per shipment) cuts negative-review-by-postcode by ~40%. Same cost. Better experience. The data is in the carrier-by-postcode reports nobody is running.
If you don't know your worst region by carrier, you are paying for an avoidable churn problem.
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SWSam·Drinks·LinkedIn·5 May
Three things craft drinks brands underestimate when moving to DTC
Three things craft drinks brands underestimate when moving to DTC.
1. Bottle weight pushes you into carrier brackets that flip the per-order maths.
2. Age-verified delivery costs more per attempt than per success.
3. Glass breakage compounds across the customer service tail, not just the replacement unit.
I'm seeing distilleries plan their first DTC year off a per-bottle shipping cost. None of them survive Q2 of the plan.
Plan off contribution per order, not unit cost. The maths is different. The decisions follow.