A friend here in the Kansas City area (we’ll call him Fred) and I were homebrewing on a Saturday this past June (I was doing my Kölsch for the season; he was doing a Berliner Weiss, in case you were wondering). Fred is working on a brewery business plan, and when he found out I was going to work at Atlas and would be selling packaging to craft breweries all over the country, he said “I need to call you after I get my business plan written.” Fred’s a bright fellow: an accountant by training and a much more talented brewer than I am (not to mention a great father of six kids..one more than me). But he was completely wrong about when he should call Atlas. I appreciate his sentiment: Fred didn’t want to “waste our time” with pricing on labels and crowns and carriers when he didn’t have artwork, and didn’t even have sizes, and he knew it would be a good year before he would be placing an order, if at all. But it’s not a waste of time to for us to talk to prospective breweries. If you are really serious about “going pro,” you should call Atlas sooner, rather than later. By “really serious,” we mean you’re spending time on equipment vendor sites, doing grain and yield calculations, and kicking around possible brewery names. You don’t have to have your investors lined up yet, or your TTB application in, to be “really serious” in our book.

”  You don’t have to have your investors lined up yet, or your TTB application in, to be “really serious” in our book.  “

Heck, if you found our website and you are reading this post, you qualify as “really serious.” And that means we’d love to chat to you—and the sooner, the better. You’re not wasting our time, and we won’t waste yours Packaging options, lead times, costs, and practical minimum order quantities are critical pieces of information in a well-thought-out business plan, and we can provide rough numbers to you, very easily. Don’t be afraid to call us on the phone. Email and web inquiries are great, but at this stage in the process, it’s much easier better to have a real, live voice conversation (or even a Skype or Google+ video chat) so that we can ask questions and fully explore your plan, talk about art requirements, and make suggestions for developing that “back of the napkin” logo into an effective brand. In case you wondered why we don’t just put our pricing on our website—that’s why. We want to make sure you’re getting all your packaging needs met in the right way (OK, that’s labels and carriers—but did you remember mother cases? Did you remember crowns?). An impersonal website with pricing tables on it does not make for a good packaging partner. Call us. We’ll ask you a bunch of questions, and after our conversation we’ll follow up with a proposal that will give you budget numbers, lead times, and samples. It will take 30 minutes of your time. It will take 35 minutes of our time. That 30 minutes may save you lots of headaches and lots of money later in the process. We won’t try to sell you anything, and we aren’t seeking any binding commitment from you to buy from us when the time comes to execute your plan (although we hope you will—that’s the point). But we do want to connect. We look forward to hearing from you!