Since launching last year, 35cl Cocktail Co. has already released four collections of its bottled cocktails. Its team isn’t new to a remote work setup since they’ve been concocting cocktails at home, but doing business during a crisis? How exactly did they handle it?
Our work arrangements also had to change as we had to shift from meeting daily to a few times a week instead. Even if we’re a small team, it took time to adjust how we operated and how we interacted with people, with health and safety in mind.How did you manage to thrive in this crisis? What are your specific strategies? We got lucky that our product was something accessible to people and could be appreciated even in the context of a pandemic.
Especially for experiential bars, it’s hard to shift from facing your customers to providing your drinks through bottles, or having the uncertainty of being able to serve alcohol due to the liquor ban. It’s generally difficult for anyone operating with a physical space now not just because of regulations but because of the overall sentiment for going out. We do think that it’s recovering but similar to the entire food, beverage, and hospitality industry, it will take more time to fully recover.
We faced our own set of uncertainties during the third collection. One of our suppliers is based outside Manila, so they had difficulties sending alcohol to us during ECQ and MECQ where cities and provinces had strict checkpoints and varying liquor ban rules. MECQ was also reimplemented a few weeks into the collection so we had to pause our operations for a bit.