2022 has been an exciting year for J. Gow Rum, reaping the rewards of their hard work coming together.
J. Gow Rum, which takes its name from the infamous Orkney pirate John Gow, was founded by Collin Van Schayk, who had grown up working in many different roles for the family business Orkney Wine Company. Colin had spotted a gap in the Orkney market for his favourite go-to-drink of rum, creating his own rum company (making the rum from start to finish) in 2016.
Produced on Lamb Holm, an Orkney Island only 0.15 square miles, the distillery sits meters away from the sea, boasting views of the Orkney Churchill barriers and the Italian Chapel. Lamb Holm may even be one of the smallest rum producing islands in the world!
This month will see the distillery double in size, providing much more room for its continued expansion. J. Gow Rum’s first white rum will also be released this September (perfect for cocktails), as well as the first of their 5-year rums, coming out in October.
We caught up with Collin to find out more about his journey and learnings so far.
Biggest business success to date?
The craziest one was an independent bottle we did, our first indie bottle, through Boutique-y Rum. They bought a cask of rum from us, and sold it under their brand but still listed J. Gow Rum Distillery on the label, and that sold out within 10 minutes which was pretty incredible. Ever since then it’s been pretty crazy, any limited releases we do, sell out in a couple of hours.
What do you wish you knew when you started, that you know now?
How much the costs of everything would rise. It’s pretty crazy, but everyone's in the same boat.
What has been the toughest challenge for your business so far?
In this kind of business, the initial cashflow is tough because this early on, we’re not going to see a lot of the products that we’re producing, available for sale, for another 8 or 12 years, so you have to really plan things, and figure that out, it’s really just cash management.
The main goal is 8-year-old and 12-year-old rums, so we do have a bit of a wait, but we have limited edition and single releases planned each year too. We’ll be releasing our unaged white rum in the middle of September. It’s a quicker ROI because it’s made in 5 days and then distilled and sold in the next week.
What kind of impact did covid have on your biz?
We do quite a bit of trade through the shop, which wasn’t able to be open, we were only open for 10 weeks in 2020, but we switched to online selling which really kept us going. We released our first 3-year-old rum at the tail end of lockdown, and it went really well and was all online.
What has CRC done to help your business?
They've helped streamline the accountancy processes and helped me switch to better programs and apps - things that save a lot of time like being able to take photos of receipts, upload them in there, and not having to manually enter anything saves you a lot of time. They're great that way that they're up to date with what apps to use.
They did some financial forecasting which was pretty interesting because it showed us a whole other side of things that we never thought about”
What one piece of advice would you give to someone starting a business?
“Don’t do it” Collin joked.
Be prepared to work lots of hours, because no one else will do it if you don’t. Especially when we first started, before we had streamlined a lot of the processes. CRC helped a lot with that too. Not spending hours and hours on accounting, and focusing on the processes more.
What is a key piece of advice that you live by?
Do what you can when you can. If you have a huge list of things that needs doing, do the stuff first that you can actually do right now. Don’t worry about the things that you feel like ‘I need to do this’ but you can’t physically do it until other parts or materials arrive. That’s what I go by in the day-to-day running of things.
Whilst Collin’s sister helps him part-time in the shop, and his dad assists with the bigger, ‘two-man jobs’, everything else is done solely by himself, including the impressive label designs which he hand draws, and taught himself how to digitalise.
Keep up the great work Collin, we can’t wait to see your next plans come to fruition (and try the new releases too!)
