Discover why Emily and the team at Boxing Rock are such big fans of Breww!

Boxing Rock was founded in 2012 by two chemical engineers who fell in love with Shelburne, Nova Scotia – the place, the people and the lifestyle.
They create craft beer experiences and focus on quality and consistency, making use of their engineering backgrounds. 

Emily and Henry started brewing in lobster pots in the backyard and fermenting in carboys in the living room (which occasionally meant yeast clumps on the ceiling)… Now Boxing Rock is brewing award-winning beers and is firmly part of team Breww! 

Why did you start using Breww?

Boxing Rock (BR) went on a journey for several years of trying to find brewery management software that helped the brewery without making promises and then underdelivering. Unfortunately, without naming names, this included two competitors of Breww.

The other solutions we tried weren’t terrible, but they just didn’t feel intuitive to us. Instead of saving us time, which is a massive driver for using brewery management software, in some cases they made everything take longer because the way the software worked didn’t make sense to our brewers and sales team.

With the fallout from Covid-19, BR started working with a consultancy firm called MNP, and they highlighted, whilst working with them, that what was needed was software that talked with their accountancy software Xero and a decent CRM option. They had an existing keg tracking supplier who was great, and they included a basic CRM, but BR needed something more extensive. 

Which areas of the business has Breww helped you to improve? 

MNP started looking at options for Boxing Rock, and they organically found Breww during their research. This was great because immediately, BR saw that Breww had free integrations with Xero, and keg tracking was included too. So, it allowed them to save money immediately by switching to Breww and using the ‘container’ keg tracking feature, and Breww offers a brewery-specific CRM system that ticks all of their boxes. 

Boxing Rock has a complex setup. They have three specific parts of their business make-up, which are; Production Brewery & Wholesale, Shelburne Taproom & Retail (which also includes their barrel-works), and lastly, due to Canadian distribution laws, they set up the Halifax Retail & Licensee Sales outlet (including a 1 bbl nano brewery). 

So, yet again, Breww have BR covered with the ability to set up multiple locations within the platform, which allows them and all Breww customers to manage stock effectively across different business activities. 

Which features in Breww could you not live without?"

For me personally, it's the integration with our accountancy platform. Before Breww, it would be difficult to connect our sales activity to account management - everything had to be manually transferred over.  The disconnect made it very difficult and was part of the time cost of using our previous software supplier.  Now our sales team has all the account information at their fingertips - making collecting payment much more efficient!

Another is the deposit return scheme functionality. BR use the deposit scheme to keep track of refundable container deposits for cans that they have to remit to 'Divert Nova Scotia'. However, some of their customers must be excluded from the deposit scheme because they charge and remit the deposit themselves. The Breww team and the deposit return scheme functionality can facilitate this easily and has them covered again. 

The price book functionality is another Emily cannot live without. She acknowledged that the concept wasn’t created by Breww originally but loves how our Dev team has developed the system in a very intuitive way. It allows them to create a complicated series of pricing structures and apply and operate them in a seamless way. 

Lastly, Emily and the Boxing Rock team really value the ability to raise feature requests and community content/interaction. Breww is constantly evolving and improving whilst being voted on and driven by the community of customers within the platform. 

How has your business grown with Breww? 

Emily commented and was happy to share that they have seen healthy growth in their licensee business. This growth is not strictly a direct result of using Breww, it has been due to some economic factors too. The BR team have taken advantage of some market opportunities as a result, and through the hard work of their sales team and with the use of Breww, they have recorded a growth in licensee sales by 50% YoY. 

So, although Emily can’t say specifically that this was down to Breww, she confirmed that their processes from using the platform have 100% contributed towards this growth. As well as providing a vast time-saving benefit for the team too!

Breww doesn’t just promise it will do something. It delivers on those promises too. And it does it in a way that makes sense for breweries - it was clearly designed by people who know how breweries operate and can anticipate the challenges we have.

Boxing Rock also need to calculate their Canadian excise, Breww doesn’t currently have the functionality for this, but it is indeed on the roadmap for all countries to calculate excise taxes automatically. Breww currently does this for UK Duty and TTB in the United States. However, BR can easily calculate this within minutes due to Breww's custom reporting, and this is a valuable workaround with a minimal time cost in the interim. 

How often are you engaging with the community in Breww?

Emily advised they aren’t delving into the community daily. However, Boxing Rock uses this powerful feature effectively by validating decision-making on new integrations and how best to use Breww. The team loves the feature request functionality and the ticket-raising system. She was very kind to acknowledge the Breww team's speedy service response levels and that our Account Managers are extremely knowledgeable.

We use Shopify for our B2C sales at our Halifax retail location and wanted to turn on the Breww integration for better inventory control. Before doing this, we jumped into the community articles to learn more about other people’s experiences using the integration and looked at the how-to guides before starting the process.

You can easily use Breww to filter customer data in marketing activities too. BrewwQL can be used for creating rules within the data from Shopify to identify sales opportunities. But also, you can just easily pause the integration if you need to, with a simple click of a button and then switch it back on again. 

Would you recommend Breww?

Absolutely yes! Our Sales Manager regularly says, what would we do without Breww!? We switched phone providers recently, and his phone temporarily lost access to the system, and he was at a loss. I initially thought he was worried about not having the use of his phone, and I offered to lend him a phone, but he was like, no, I just need access to Breww!