Whats up at Superjam and Beer52?

Fraser Doherty has run Superjam or Eat Super for many years. They raised around £300k on Crowdcube a few years ago. He is also a hands on director Beer52, an Edinburgh based beer subscription site which raised £100k on Angels Den  in 2014 and then another £800k privately via HNW individuals last year.

We have written about both here and here. 

It is difficult to understand the figures as related to both companies. Superjam should, according to the Crowdcube vision, be making over £1.5m profit but instead made £3k on what appears to be a modest turnover. They seem to have lost all of their major UK listings apart from a one jam , heavily discounted offer in Waitrose. They were everywhere.

Beer52 have done better but articles that appeared after the 2016 funding stated that their 2015 turnover was £2.6m and in 2016 it was going to be £8m. Nothing in the accounts filed (to June 17) suggests figures of this size. Losses have become breakeven over the period. Not the vision that Angels Den promoted. 

Anyone any ideas?

Another sticky mess - Superjam in fruitless search for profit

Superjam  - no not some confused 70's tribute band - leaves investors cold with results many miles off target.

Superjam is the brainchild of one very famous young man, Fraser Doherty OBE or 'Jam Boy' . Unfortunately for Crowdcube investors, Fraser's charity work has not translated into a money making business. Well not yet anyway. 

Superjam raised £318k at the start of 2015 for his existing Jam business. He makes Jam. You get the idea. 

He doesnt sell that much Jam though - hence the small profit of £3,000 compared with the Crowdcube projected figure of almost £700,000. We thought he might have paid out massive dividends, but his corporate tax account suggests he just didnt make much. YE September 2017 has a profit tag of £1.3m. His claim that it's stocked in Waitrose seems to have passed its sellby date - the link on the company website doesnt work. The Waitrose site helpfully tells you that this product is unavailable. It's been like this for a while - at least 6 months. The link to the Ocado site doesn't work either and a search there for SJ, brings up Bonne Maman - which is not such a bright idea!

A little giveaway is the TM printed next to every Superjam logo. Surely he knows this is totally meaningless?

He is also heavily involved with Beer52, an Angels Den miscreant and failed Crowdcube pitcher. This is another online business building stability on sand with heavy use of the now infamous discount code to collect 'customers'. We wrote about them here. You can still get a 75% discount 3 years later. Losses are mounting.

All in all, exactly what you would expect. 

Beer52 up their customer service but are still way off targets

Beer52, set up by the same guy behind Superjam, used to get the most appalling reviews.

They seem to have fixed this over the last year.

However in their equity crowdfunding projections on Angels Den, they showed a profit for 2015 of just under £1m.

Actual filed accounts show a loss for the period of £114k.

So still some way to go!

Beer52 and Flavourly have alarming similarities

Here are some reviews of a company that raised equity crowdfunding on Angels Den a while back, taken from the Business Matters website. This company is 'advised' by Ryan O'Rourke who runs Flavourly. Flavourly raised money on Crowdcube. Flavourly's reviews have been an issue for sometime and have been mentioned on this blog.

You begin to see a common theme here?

To prevent equity crowdfunding descending into the abyss something needs to done.

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  Takis • a year ago

  
  

  Scam, scam, SCAM. Badly marketed, hidden charges, impossible to cancel, can't get through to anyone. If it doesn't get resolved soon, I will also ask my bank to block payments.

  
  

  
  

   

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  Jons • a year ago

  
  

  total scam. send a letter by recorded delivery to their address and instruct your bank to block future charges from them. its the only way out

  
  

  
  

   

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  Johnno • 2 years ago

  
  

  Total scam. It's virtually impossible to stop the subscription and they keep taking money off your card details

  
  

  
  

   

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  Ricko • 2 years ago

  
  

  I couldn't agree more with arvedui, their concept is great but their business practices are appalling. Avoid Avoid AVOID.

  
  

  
  

   

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  arvedui • 2 years ago

  
  

  Beer52 is a fucking scam. It's almost impossible to contact them, and there's no easy way to cancel the subscription. I've been trying to stop the delivery for some time now and have not managed it. Avoid at all costs!

BEER52 - Yet another epic failure for Equity Crowdfunding. Here's why.

Beer52 is a online craft beer subscription site run out of Scotland. It has taken the internet and the upsurge in craft beers to create a new demand.

In January 2014, Beer52 raised £100,000 on Angels Den. This ECF platform purports to be different to others - but we will go into that later.

The pitch has all the usual misinformation you might expect from an ECF platform. It states that year one will deliver a NP after tax of £316,000. This allows for the usual ridiculous company valuation. Year1 filed accounts now show a loss of £86,000. So a difference of ~ 450% on their projections.

Looking in more detail at the pitch plan, there are some obvious reasons why they have missed by such a large margin. As with a few other ECF pitched businesses, strangely run by the same people, Beer52 launched with a Groupon heavy discount deal. This was a Christmas deal and as you might expect was jumped on by bargain hunters.

In the plan it all appears rather differently. The plan states that they had 6,500 subscribers in their first 3 days and sold 30,000 bottles in the first month. No mention here of the Groupon deal. Its uses these figures to extrapolate its Yr1 projections - the ones it has just missed. Groupon is not a sensible way to up your retention rate. We all know that.

This technique was also used by Flavourly.com, who funded on Angels Den and then Crowdcube, after their results missed projections. The Flavourly.com founder is an 'advisor' to Beer52. So I suppose we can expect to see Beer52 on another ECF platform anytime soon.

What Beer52 dont tell you is that for them to be able to offer these beers at a good price, they have to deal mainly in bin ends - lines that the brewers cant shift. Subscribers will not hang around for long to put up with this sort of con.

So how do Angels Den fare in all of this? Well the platform has had a number of successes - successful funding that is. It claims to have a 90% rate of funded businesses still active. Well ahead of the sector norm, it proudly declares. When you look into this claim, it proves to be totally spurious. The platform has only been funding businesses for just over a year - so its is hardly surprising that few have gone bust. It took Crowdcube almost 2 years to see its first collapse. It is just another example of the ECF platforms' desperate attempts to sell themselves.

As a footnote Angels Den seem to have a large number of pitches that have either raised money on other ECF platforms or worse have failed to raise money on other ECF platforms. It appears you can do the circuit now, selling your wares to the first idiot willing to buy.