Mackmyra Establishing Subsidiary In Britain
The UK market is in many ways a key market for Mackmyra. In order to accelerate growth, investments are now being made that will result in, among other things, sales and marketing activities there being carried out by the company’s own staff. This new approach will be based on the newly established subsidiary Mackmyra Swedish Whisky Ltd.
Since 2014, Great Britain, together with Germany and France, have been the priority export markets for Mackmyra. The total growth in these three prioritised export markets between 2014 and 2017 was 360%. This has been a major contributing factor in Mackmyra’s positive development in recent years. Mackmyra is now an international company with a significant share of its sales outside Sweden. The Swedish market is relatively limited in terms of size and the strategy for continued growth involves investment in a few selected export markets, which have the potential to deliver very large sales volumes in the future.
The market for craft spirits has grown rapidly in both the USA and Europe in recent years. Mackmyra has worked as a craft spirits distillery since it was founded in 1999 and aims to be a leader in what is internationally known as New World Whisky. Mackmyra’s wide and innovative range of customised and personalised malt whisky products in bottles and in personal 30-litre whisky casks has aroused great interest internationally for many years. Following the establishment of Mackmyra LAB Distillery, Mackmyra now also offers Swedish craft gin and has thus opened the door to another product segment in the major European markets in which Mackmyra is active.
A key part of Mackmyra’s business model involves actively meeting consumers at tasting sessions, trade fairs and other events, which allows products and the business in general to be developed with input from customers. This type of close consumer interaction, which is a form of crowdsourcing, has been a key characteristic of the company in Sweden since it was founded in 1999. It is an approach that creates interest in the brand in an effective way, and is in demand in the current boom in craft spirits in Europe and the USA.
Great Britain is at the forefront of craft spirits development, with numerous small whisky and gin distilleries that have been established in recent years as a result of the rapidly growing interest. The timing regarding the introduction of Swedish craft single malt whisky and craft gin on a larger scale in this market is therefore optimal.
Mackmyra is now making a radical strategic change in order to be able to take a leading position in the rapidly growing craft spirits segment in Great Britain. This approach is based around the newly created and wholly-owned subsidiary Mackmyra Swedish Whisky Ltd, which is in the initial stages of establishment and is expected to become fully operational during the second half of 2018. In parallel to this, the cooperation with Mackmyra’s current importer in Great Britain is being phased out, and sales and marketing activities in Great Britain will in the future be conducted by the company’s own staff. Around 100 million bottles of whisky are sold each year in Great Britain, which is more than 10 times the size of the Swedish market. The volume of gin sold there is also many times higher than in the Swedish market.
“Mackmyra’s business model, with its own sales team and plenty of consumer interaction, has been very successful in Sweden and Germany. We strongly believe that this is the right way forward for achieving our full potential in the UK market,” comments Magnus Dandanell, Managing Director of Mackmyra Svensk Whisky AB.