Crawford Bock
When I started with Karbach in 2017, the company was generating most of its growth from two core brands: Love Street Blonde and Hopadillo IPA. While these two beers were still growing, Karbach sought new innovation to add growth to its current arsenal. After observing some other breweries in the US establish relationships with major sports franchises, my brand manager and I sought out to do the same thing for Karbach. Under my direction, we developed a pitch to build a collaboration beer with the MLB’s Houston Astros. I directed the approach with the organization so that the pitch was sincere and included bringing the organization into the actual day-to-day brand development phases throughout the process. I also proposed a value-add component by which Karbach would donate a portion of proceeds for every beer sold to the Astros Foundation, the team’s primary community charity organization.
The pitch was successful and the team agreed to an Astros-branded beer with Karbach. I treated the organization as a cohort and, even though I managed the creative and strategic process (All creative courtesy of the amazing Guerilla Suit - Austin, TX), I encouraged the Astros to put their fingerprint on as many aspects of the brand as possible. They enjoyed the process and even chose the beer style and the name from a naming convention list. When we launched in 2019, our original forecast was to generate roughly $560,000 in additional revenue from sales of the beer. Within weeks of the launch, the product blew past initial forecasts and ended up generating approximately $10,000,000 to the company for the year and was recognized as the most successful new craft beer innovation for the entire United States (per IRI scan data) in 2019. The brand still lives on today and is a top 10 craft beer in the state of Texas.