We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kenneth Thrower. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kenneth below.

Alright, Kenneth thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s talk about keeping costs under control when growing. How have you managed to keep costs from getting out of control?

We just opened less than a year ago and one of the things we have been working towards is expanding our production to where we can finally self distribute to local bars and bottle shops.

As it is just two of us primarily running the shop one of the ways we are able to keep costs low is to simply put any funds we may have used to pay ourselves back into the business. This is what we did when we expanded our production by buying several 500L secondary containers and what we did when we were able to get our full sign above the building.

As we have been growing we have fortunately been able to track our revenue and see around when it will cover all of our business operation costs for the month. If it is able to cover all costs for the month relatively early, Derrick and I will usually decide if there are any larger purchases or upgrades we would like to purchase to make future business operations easier, more efficient or larger scaling. If there are we will go ahead and grab what we need and typically the rest of our revenue for the month will cover it.

After almost a year we have been able to scale our production to a point where we can start distribution locally as well as host a wide variety of events that we think the community around us will love.

Now the goal is to find local businesses to distribute to and widen our reach to the local community about all the events we host!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We are Moon Dog Meadery. Derrick first tried mead at a renaissance faire about 10 years ago. After trying it he decided to try brewing it himself with the help from his parents and their home brewing experience.

After several years of making mead and fruit wines with his parents he became a lot better at brewing than his parents and they started to have him make all their future batches by himself.

Derrick met Kenneth in 2017 at a local rock climbing gym meetup where they became fast friends. Over the pandemic they both found themselves with a lot of free time and Kenneth decided to learn how to make mead from Derrick. After running 4 batches back to back creating new flavors and recipes Derrick reached out to Kenneth about possibly starting a business together. Where Derrick would focus on the main business and finances and Kenneth would focus on the marketing and events. Both would focus on the day to day and mead making process as needed.

We strive to make the best mead for our customers. We also strive to create a safe and fun environment for everyone with a wide variety of events for people to come and join.

Board game nights, paint and sips, trivia, karaoke, fire spinning night, live music, open mic night, swing dance night, comedy night and many other one time events. We love hearing what people want to bring to Moon Dog and we try our best to change things up and offer unique events like our winter solstice event where we will have a Beowulf themed event with a UNC professor lecture about medieval lore and then a black metal bland playing after. Some really cool things we are looking forward to.

Almost all of our events are free to join!

We love local. Local businesses, local brews and the local community. We try our best to keep the dollars we earn going back into the local economy. We only buy North Carolina brewed beers, ciders, seltzers and wines, We use honey from local apiaries for our mead, We collaborate with our local fellow business Joe Van Gogh to help create our coffee mead, We host and showcase a wide variety of artists in our art gallery and during some of our events. Our business will live and die based on the local support and we want to show that same love back.

Finally we are working to bring our mead outside of our shop and into stores throughout the local Triangle area. We want our product to be as easily accessible as possible to those who cannot make the drive out to our little shop. If you have any suggestions or want to carry our mead let us know!

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

Not all of our marketing and business ideas have worked out for us. Some things we believe will be next level marketing ideas turn out to completely backfire and some ideas that we think will likely fail will end up being one of the best ideas we have implemented into the shop.

Mead is the alcohol made from honey. The alcohol synonymous with the vikings and the gods of Valhalla. The alcohol which is best enjoyed in my mind from an ale horn. So one of the things we wanted to implement here at Moon Dog was the ability to choose between a standard classy glass and the barbaric badass alehorn for your glass of mead.

We ordered the ale horns but when they arrived they smelled like cow manure. Any time they were dry they were fine but as soon as they got wet they would smell and that is not a good smell to whiff as you are drinking your mead. We tried doing several things to fix the smell but by the end of it all it just was not worth it to use them for serving our mead. So we swallowed our pride and money and literally shelved it.

On the other end of the spectrum one thing we wanted to do but thought would not bring too much attention to us was hanging and selling pieces of art in our wall gallery. We just wanted to get some cool art pieces on our walls to spice up our lobby but as we have put more pieces up and brought more artists in we have consistently sold and swapped many pieces of art in and out. It has also led to us getting more contacts with artists and helped us start our biweekly paint and sip event. It’s kind of crazy to see how much this one change in our space has added and expanded things in the near future for us already.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Our best source for new clients has always been word of mouth. We do run some advertising on google and we do try to do as many interviews or media events that come our way (Thanks for reaching out to us again!) but we do not have a large budget for marketing as we are still working to get to the point where we can pay ourselves and move towards running this company full time by itself.

The people that come here and love the experience, enjoy the events and converse with us. Those are the people that tell their friends and families. They are the ones who bring people out. They are the ones that make it possible for us to do what we enjoy doing.

Making mead, putting on fun events that we as owners love, making new friends and connections and so much more. We are truly grateful to anyone who comes down to Moon Dog to support us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.moondogmeadery.com
• Instagram: @moondogmeadery
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoonDogMeadery
• Other: contact@moondogmeadery.com

Image Credits
Kenneth Thrower (pictures) Timothy Colin Boardman (Moon Dog Meadery Logo)