Standard Meadery in Villa Park, Illinois, specializes in all things mead, from dessert-inspired beverages to the more standard still styles and even session meads. They received their license last March, only a week before COVID shut down much of the country.
However, despite significant challenges, the meadery has excelled, gaining popularity for its variety of traditional and whimsical releases such as the Meadowfoam Blackberry Blossom traditional-style mead or the Symbiosis Piña Colada smoothie-style session mead with pineapple, coconut, and key lime.
Behind the wizardry is Adam Lynch, owner and head mead maker at Standard. Starting as a one-man show, Adam often found himself in charge of everything from making the mead and running the meadery’s day-to-day operations to organizing can and bottle releases and spearheading the meadery’s membership club.
So before officially launching, Adam decided to leverage Oznr, a direct-to-consumer eCommerce platform, to help out with his one to two monthly releases, bottle pickups, and Finer Things Club.
We sat down with Adam to chat about opening a meadery during a global pandemic, how he first heard about Oznr, and how the app helped Standard Meadery continue to grow.
GW: For those who are unfamiliar with Standard Meadery, give me a couple sentences about the operation. What are you all about?
AL: We do a very modern version of mead. We play more in the dessert-style meads on the sweeter side. We do make everything from dry to sweet meads, but the majority of what we make is on the sweeter side.
Right now, we make two different styles. We do our still mead, which is more of a traditional mead, higher ABV, served 1-2oz pours. Much like a port wine. And then we do session meads. They’re lower ABV, carbonated, and range from 5-6.5% alcohol. We do a lot of lower ABV stuff, everything from seltzer-style—we call it honey seltzer—all the way up to full-on smoothie-style meads similar to stuff like 450 North. We can that product, and all of our other stuff is served in bottles.
GW: You started using Oznr before your taproom opened. How did you first hear about Oznr? Why did you start using the platform?
AL: I’m really good friends with Phase Three Brewing, and they started using Oznr before we did. We talked to them, and then when the Oznr team was in town, we actually met them. It seemed like a good fit for us because, when met with them, we hadn’t even started our membership program yet. We were still waiting on the licensing to come in. And once that came in, we initially ran our membership through Oznr.
We got licensed the weekend before everything got crazy last March. We used this platform to sell and set up pickups at our facility for everything we sold for at least six months. We finally got to open [the taproom] in the fall for six weeks before everything closed again. We reopened this March and we’ve been open since March in the taproom, but we’ve been selling product the whole time.
GW: You said Oznr seemed like a good fit for your membership club. How does the app help you manage your membership program?
AL: For us it was the ease of use. We don't have a large staff. We have a fairly decent-sized membership of around 300 members. They get first access to everything we produce before public sales. They also get exclusive member bottles included in the membership, which roll out over the year. Oznr gives us a way to track all of that.
Additionally, Oznr makes proxy pickups very simple. The customer can set their own proxies on the Oznr app [iOS + Android]. They come in and we can pull up by email to see everything that needs to be picked up by that one person that is proxying. My staff doesn’t have to spend a lot of time managing the actual membership. A lot of that is handled by the consumers themselves. When they come in to pick up, we have everything in order and pull everything and get it ready for them.
GW: You mentioned the app saved your staff a lot of time. Do you have any specific metrics on that?
AL: I can’t exactly say, but for every release, if we had to actually field emails for proxies and create a spreadsheet to manage that, you’re talking about potentially 100-150 people emailing us that [want] someone else to pick up their bottle. And we would have to track that on [a] spreadsheet and then get stuff ready. We have members that pick up [for] 14 to 15 different people. So for every release, you could be talking about somewhere between 20-30 extra man-hours, I would think, just sorting through emails and making sure everything is straight. Now, with the Oznr app, we can just pull everything up on one screen and pick out the bottles while they’re here.
GW: When was your first official release? How did it go?
AL: Our first release was in May 2020. We’ve been pretty lucky. We have a decent amount of interest in what we do. We have been able to sell out quickly.
Some of that might be due to the fact that Chicago is a great market for Oznr. There are quite a few breweries and two meaderies here that use it. The audience is really big. We have a lot of subscribers on Oznr. They get an alert three minutes before the sale. It’s almost like we have a captive audience when we put something up for sale. They’re staring at their phone already because they just got the alert, so we have a lot of people attempting to purchase product at that moment as opposed to us putting up an Instagram and then two days later our consumers have to remember that it goes on sale at noon.
That captive audience has been really good for us in terms of selling out quickly. People can just go on Oznr, they already have a credit card saved, hit Buy Now, and make a purchase and then move on with their day. Instead of the release being a whole ordeal and setting up 30 minutes early.
GW: How many followers do you have on Oznr now?
AL: At one point we had more followers on Oznr than we did on Instagram. Right now we have 2,970 followers on Oznr (we’re really close to 3,000) and 2,850 on Instagram!
This is because people in the area are essentially shopping in the Chicago tab. They look through and decide maybe they want something from them and they’ll subscribe and if we send out an alert they will get that on their phone.
I think having subscribers makes Oznr really valuable. Also because we have really popular breweries in the area that are also using Oznr with two to three times more subscribers than we do, we can get more eyeballs on our listings when they go up.
GW: What are the top things you like most about the Oznr?
AL: The eyeballs are great.
I also like how easy it is for the consumer and how easy it is for proxies to be set up and how easy pickups go. Rather than us having to pull up a spreadsheet and search for a name on the Oznr app, it just comes up and we can claim everything right there.
We don’t have any issues with it.
GW: Have you ever used the Random Draw feature?
AL: We’ve used the Random Draw a couple times, but it's been very limited. We haven’t done anything big, but when we have very limited products for members, we used it just to be fair and equitable for our members to have a shot at something we didn't have enough for everybody on. It works well. I like that we have little to no control, it's totally random. I’m not picking winners.
That feature seems to work well. We really haven’t used it too much, just a couple of times.
GW: What would you say has been your most successful release to date on the Oznr app?
AL: They’ve all been pretty successful! The releases have been very good on Oznr. We’ve sold out in seconds pretty much every release we’ve done, which has been fantastic.
Our Peanut Butter and Jelly session mead was one of our largest releases that hit the public. We had a pretty good amount for the public to purchase. We make 7bbls, so it’s not huge but that’s big for us. That one sold out.
GW: If you were to recommend Oznr to someone else and pay it forward, kind of like Phase Three did for you, what would you say?
AL: They’re really good guys, they're super easy to work with, and they pick up the phone when I call, which is awesome. They’re super accessible and receptive to any ideas I might have. They’ve implemented a couple of our ideas, which is great. We’ve been a user since early on.
GW: What are some of the ideas that you had that Oznr implemented?
AL: Simple little things like the way things are sorted, display screen, so you don’t have to go back into the offer to view all settings on the offer. Just things that make our life easier on the back end. Front end, they have a handle on that. It looks great in the app.
The easier they make it for the consumer to purchase, the easier it is for us to get them to purchase. You just hit a button!
Now they’re implementing shipping and we’re working on our back end to get our permits in line, so we can start shipping to other states. We’re starting with 10 states first and slowly growing that over time. We’re technically a winery, so if we file the proper paperwork, we can ship to 43 states. We’re working to build that back end so when we scale up we won’t need distribution in other places, we can just ship direct-to-consumer. Oznr has a platform to offer that ability. We've been working with them on the back end there. What information do we need, so we can properly report to all these states taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, tracking gallons, and stuff like that.
