Around this time of year, Chris and I find ourselves talking about the purpose of our business. Yes, we are a business, so we have financial goals. But, the center of our discussion is almost always on the three core values we set for The Glass Jug way back in the beginning. We decided long ago that if we can do the following, above all else, the numbers will follow, and we will have done some good with our business and with our lives.
Build Community
Create Happiness
Be Customer Focused
We talk about our core values with our staff formally during every team meeting, and at least one of them comes up during conversation almost daily. These values have guided us in making big decisions, like when we decided to move from our original location to our current, much larger spot where we added a brewery to our retail business. They also drive small daily choices, like whether or not we should host a small educational event that won’t be profitable, but will help us really engage with customers.
Until now, we haven’t made these values public. We haven’t made public anything about our charitable giving, either. ‘Ya know why? It is just personally uncomfortable to us. We generally prefer for our charitable efforts to be done quietly. But, we know you good folks are mindful shoppers. You support all things local, eco-friendly, and humane, and it matters to you what businesses are doing with your hard-earned money. So, we acquiesce and are here to tell you what we stand for, what we’re trying to do here, and how we’re working tirelessly (that’s an exaggeration, it is sometimes exhausting) making your money do good. And, we are committing to do a better job keeping you in the loop on these efforts in the future.
Building Community
We’re not (and will not likely ever be) a big, regional brewer with customers all over the Southeast. The vast majority of people buying our beer are walking through our front door, right here in South Durham. It’s where we live, where we work, and where our customers are, so we’ve made it our priority to focus here. When we opened, we felt like the South Durham community embraced us, in part, because it had been missing a local gathering place. Though South Durham feels like its own community, it is not technically a separate small town, distinct from the city of Durham as a whole. So, we don’t have a Main Street. There wasn’t a general store, a small-town gas station, or a local lunch spot like in most small towns, where everyone can gather.
We realized right away that our first, and primary, core value would be to build community.
Big picture, we believe brewery taprooms should be a community space that is welcoming to people of every gender, race, ethnicity, belief system, and lifestyle. But, we want to go beyond simply providing that space for the community to gather. We want to play an active participating role in building our community. We couldn’t possibly list all the things we have done to build community in 2019 here, because our whole team is thinking about building community as our primary goal every single day. But, here’s a few easy tangibles:
Each year, The Glass Jug gives away 10% of our profit to local or national non-profit organizations whose missions align with our core values. These organizations are often tied to science, as that is such a strong part of our brand and identity. We do consider social sciences to be sciences. Some of the organizations we’ve supported in 2019 are:
The Boys & Girls Club of Durham & Orange Counties, to give all Durham kids a fighting chance in education.
South Durham Farmer’s Market, to support the weekly market that provides an important outlet for ecologically-minded, local farmers and provides our customers the opportunity to buy local, mindfully grown/crafted products.
Coalition for Social Justice, a Durham-based non-profit, to help fight against discrimination in our political system.
Triangle Off-Road Cyclists, to help them raise money for local trail construction and improvement projects that will get more folks outdoors.
Durham’s Queer Prom, to support the Human Rights Campaign.
Animal Protection Society of Durham, to provide care for local animals in need.
UNC Rowing Club, to build a new boathouse, so young athletes and local community members can experience the benefits of this lifetime, low-impact sport.
*Spoiler alert* We will be spending a chunk of our 2020 budget to build a pollinator garden with the community, which will be our inaugural effort in facilitating some TLC for the wetlands behind our beer garden. If you’re interested in volunteering time or funds, please email katy@glass-jug.com.
Hosted events designed to help you get to know your neighbors. So many of our events are designed with at least one element we hope will help you meet people and/or connect with folks in the community who you wouldn’t have gotten to connect with if it weren’t for the Jug. Some of them are:
A Craft Cider Tasting Experience that brought together around 150 cider drinkers and 20 different cider brands to discover new ciders, learn, and build connections.
Our Annual Neighborhood July 4th celebration with free hot dogs, grain sack races, and a water balloon toss. We also collected donations for the APS of Durham this year, so you could help save a dog while eating a hot dog!
The first annual Hops & Blues festival that connected 200+ hoppy beer fans with some of the region’s most popular IPA producers to enjoy world-class beer and blues music (from musicians paid fair wages, as part of our partnership with the Music Maker Foundation).
Free food giveaways for smaller, community-focused events throughout the year, including waffles on Galentine’s Day, donuts on National Donut Day, candy on Halloween, and Nutty Buddys on Black Friday. Food always helps bring people together :)
Harry Potter Night builds lots of relationships on the front end, as preparations are extensive and spread among a lot of people/vendors, as well as the day of. Loads of Potter fans came out to spend time together and enjoy the festivities.
Supported other like-minded and local businesses. In 2019 The Glass Jug will bring in more than $1 million in revenue by selling (almost exclusively) products made by small businesses. That means that, when you buy from the Jug, not only do your dollars go into our own company that is determined to do some good in our local community, but that a portion of your purchase will go likely to one or more other small businesses that collaborated to make the product you’re buying. And ‘ya know what? THOSE companies ALSO usually try to support small, independent vendors and causes. The impact of you spending your money with our small business has a very real and very important ripple effect. A couple examples are:
Our local cattle farmer, Queen B Farms, from Mebane, NC. He helps us dispose of our grain by picking it up and feeding it to his cattle. We then purchase meat sticks from him to sell in our taproom. The cycle repeats, both businesses win, and so does the environment, because we’re keeping that spent grain out of a landfill.
The relationships we have with other North Carolina breweries. This industry has to be the most collegial I’ve ever witnessed, and I can’t possibly express the amount of people helping people that goes on behind the scenes. But, rest easy that this tight-knit community of brewers works around the clock trying to make life better for their staff and their customers and to build micro-communities all over the state.
Made community building part of daily service. Depending on how much you’ve interacted with our bartending staff and how busy it is when you typically spend time at the Jug, you may or may not have had the opportunity to notice our daily community-building efforts behind the bar. Our staff is routinely trained to provide small touches that build community, like stepping out from behind the bar to chat with you at your table when time permits, introducing customers we think would enjoy talking to each other, and sparking conversations between two customers (who may or may not have come together). Our staff is also trained to weed out things that are deterrents to community building like over-drinking, inappropriate conversations that are affecting other patrons, unsafe behavior, harassment, etc. Fortunately, we have an excellent customer base and deal with much less of that than other bars.
Customer-Focused
Instead of being a numbers-focused or growth-focused organization, we have come to realize that if everything we do is focused on our customers, then the numbers and growth will follow. This does not mean we don’t pay attention to our profit and growth projections - we certainly do. But, we don’t let that drive our decision-making when it comes to the business. Is the customer always right? No. But, we want our customers to feel important and valued every time they step through our door.
Creating Happiness
Our third, and final, core value is to create happiness. We know we can’t create a lifetime of peace and joy for every person who walks through our doors, but we figure we CAN work hard to be sure everyone leaves The Jug slightly happier than they were when they arrived. That’s usually pretty easy…after all, we are in the business of selling world-class craft beer. But, we apply this mindset, not just to customers, but to staff, delivery drivers, brewery sales reps, UPS/FedEx folks, contractors, ourselves... literally everyone who walks through our doors. Part of how we have done that is outlined 5 Valued Characteristics of people who work at The Glass Jug. Our hope is that, by fostering these characteristics within our own team, we’ll build these in the world:
Curiosity (knowledgeable & eager to learn)
Friendliness
Excitement
Compassionate
Team Player (Jump right in-ness)
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Frankly, I always sort of thought companies having these kinds of core values laid out was nothing more than corporate jargon. But, in my experience at The Glass Jug, it’s been really wonderful to have these principles to fall back on every time I need to make a tough decision and to lift my spirits when I’m having a hard day at work. No matter how hard or frustrating a day gets, I know that I woke up and came to work today to build some community, create a little happiness, and to be focused on my customers, not myself. For me, personally, wanting to live by these values stems from my Christianity. I love that they give my whole team values to embody that they can each reconcile with their own creeds, belief systems, and life goals.
