Wishing you the best
Via this iStill Blog post, on behalf of iStill, I want to wish you all a happy and amazing new year. May 2020 be all that you hope for … and so much more! I wish you a year full of happiness and prosperity. May this year give you the opportunity to not just follow your dreams, but to realize them to their full potential.
Looking back
When I look back, it has been both a happy and an amazing voyage. In a mere 6 1/2 years, iStill has grown from a contender to the world’s leading producer of distillation equipment. We (you and us) have taken the industry by storm. Our focus on innovation, combined with the entrepreneurship of our customers, helped get us there.
And it is not just the amazing iStills that are a huge success. When we set our mind to helping the craft distilling industry forward via education, and started the iStill University Program, who could have thought that it would become the industry’s leading training facility as it did? The decision to focus on teaching people how to distill, rather than “just” selling stills, was spot on. For educational purposes, yes, for sure. But also as a means to keep in touch, to stay connected with our customers, and continue to learn what you need from us …
Listening to craft distillers and their needs all over the world, helped establish two more services. Recipe development support grew almost organically into a new business, where we help our customers to create top shelf spirits. So far 300 (!) recipes have been developed.
Finally, you asked us to help with the actual production of spirits. And that is something we have grown over the last year, to the situation where we now have a full sized distillery producing gins, whiskies, vodkas and rums for customers that want to buy iStills, but do not yet have their distillery up and running.
Towards the future
But what do we hope 2020 will be like? What will iStill focus on in 2020? What will we change? What innovations will be unveiled? Well, here is news for you: not much!
We have put tremendous effort in bringing distillery equipment to the 21st century, where our competitors still believe that bubble caps, invented in 1870, are an amazing step forward from pot distillation. With the current level of automation, robotization, and technology, we have helped push the industry to 2020. That’s a huge leap of 150 years of advancement condensed in less than seven years!
With all the attention we have given to innovation, our stills are now basically a century and a half ahead of the game. The iStill technology has grown into maturity. Emphasizing more innovation for 2020 does not make sense. What would we achieve? A 160 year lead over our competitors instead of 150? We are not in the vanguard, we are the vanguard.
So, what will we focus on in 2020 and beyond? We’ll focus on further professionalizing our organization so that your interactions with us, and as a result our mutual relationship, grow and intensify. Any contact we have is an opportunity to strengthen our bonds, to grow together. And if we don’t grow our relationship, what a missed opportunity that would be! So much so, that I’d want to minimize that risk and instead capitalize on every opportunity we have to further our customer experience by professionalizing our organization rather than pursuing ever faster rates of technological innovation.
What this means? Well, we already started updating our assembly guides. Also, we have started Distillers Weekly. An eNewsletter that informs over 2,000 subscribers on a weekly basis about advanced distilling. Also, for the annual software update, we just created a short video to help make this easier. But for 2020 there will be other improvements as well, basically around two fields of expertise: Technical Support and Sales.
William is promoted to Technical Support Manager. Any technical or technology related questions you have will be addressed by him via Support@iStillMail.com.
We are looking for a Sales Manager to help further our worldwide growth. He or she will grow our network of representatives and referral distilleries with a focus on Asia and Southern Europe, while establishing a more standardized and professionalized customer experience.
What more? Well, since this is about OUR relationship, I’d like to invite you to think with us. What do you feel we should focus on? If you have ideas or suggestions, please let me know personally via (for now) Sales@iStillMail.com.
Enlarge your world of opportunities by swimming upstream …
http://www.iStill.com
