The hidden costs no one prepares you for

If you’ve ever wondered why early-stage drinks brands don’t all launch with wild custom bottles, bespoke glassware and flavours sourced from the edge of the earth… here’s the short answer: Minimum Order Quantities (MOQs). The abbreviation that's responsible for more of our headaches than duty, logistics and HMRC combined.

Take one of our ingredients that we use across both of our products. We need roughly 3kg of it for our first commercial production run next year. Simple enough.

The supplier’s MOQ: 200kg. At £90 per kilo. Aka an £18,000 (excl VAT) invoice for something you’ll use 1.5% of whilst hoarding the rest. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.

We were dreaming of custom, squared-off pint glasses for venues. One that would really drive a second take. Great idea, but completely unachievable for a start-up. We were quoted €60,000 for the mould alone. And that’s before you’ve paid for a single glass to actually drink from.

Want fully custom barware?
Prepare your wallet: £10,000+ for tooling fees for tap handles and tap lenses.

Want a custom shipping box?
Even getting a cutter guide made can run to £1,000 before you’ve touched artwork or printing. For a cardboard box...

It’s at this point most founders realise that creativity often has less to do with vision boards and more to do with budgeting spreadsheets. Unless you’re funded like a drinks giant, these MOQs simply aren’t realistic.

So what happens next?

You start shifting back to the startup reality:

  • Using off-the-shelf packaging and point-of-sale material;

  • Tweaking and hacking what’s available;

  • Being more inventive with the pieces you can customise;

  • Getting clever in reformulations to avoid brutal ingredient MOQs;

  • Exploring distributors who hold partial stock instead of full 200kg drums; and

  • Testing ideas with small-run suppliers before going anywhere near a mould.

It's not all bad though. Constraints force creativity. 

When you can’t spend €60k on a glass mould, you have to find a smarter way to stand out. When you can’t order 200kg of an ingredient, you learn to reverse-engineer, swap inputs, or reformulate without ever compromising taste.

This is the unglamorous reality you don't see on socials. Brands have to get resourceful or suffer getting buried under MOQs and tooling fees.

Turns out something different isn’t about how much you can spend, it's about how much you can solve, stretch and improvise when suppliers throw you a 200kg curveball.

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