Next Glass’ beverage alcohol tech and media empire is crossing the northern border with the company’s acquisition of Ollie Order, an omnichannel marketplace for beverage alcohol sales and a tech platform for logistics and taxation tracking that is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.
The deal was announced today, though financial terms were not disclosed.
“The Ollie team and technology are best-in-class, as evidenced by the rapid adoption of the platform in Canada,” Next Glass CEO Trace Smith said in a press release. “We are confident that Ollie’s product, which greatly simplifies a needlessly tedious process and saves buyers and sellers valuable time, money, and headaches, will find favor with industry constituents in markets beyond Canada.”
Ollie sells more than 300 brands to more than 2,000 buyers in British Columbia. The platform “facilitates all aspects of transactions between buyers, logistics providers,
and suppliers in the beverage alcohol industry, including discovery of the latest craft products,
fulfillment, accounting, inventory, payments, invoices, CRM, and government reporting for B2B and B2C online and in-person commerce,” according to the release.
Ollie Order co-founder and CEO Ryan Wilson told Brewbound that the idea behind the platform was to “build an omnichannel tool to bring order to the chaos of running a brewery.”
“Our founders have founded a number of breweries and wineries and urban cideries and, having lived in the business for decades, they felt the pain of having to manage five different systems, at minimum, every time you process an order,” he added.
Wilson, Jesse Bannister and Mike Macquisten created the platform in 2019 to help beverage alcohol producers manage all aspects of relationships with wholesalers and retailers, but added direct-to-consumer sales to Ollie’s suite of offerings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The impetus for us to develop our second generation direct-to-consumer capabilities was when the pandemic hit, because we of course watched many of our customers’ revenues fall 70-80%,” Wilson said. “So many of them asked us ‘Hey, can you build us a tool that meets the regulatory requirements that can handle the things that are unique to beverage alcohol?’”
Although the regulatory environments in the U.S. and Canada aren’t identical, they have similar elements. In Canada, each province has a state-run liquor commission that functions as a wholesaler, and also operations retail outlets.
“Despite the fact that the regulatory environments are different, we feel that the problems around taxation, whether it’s across provinces or across borders of states, the problems are similar,” Smith said. “The people solving them have solved them north of the border, and we’re confident they’ll be able to solve them south of the border.”
“Every permutation that exists in America, we also have here,” Wilson added. “We have to have one tool that fits all of those permutations to just operate in our one province, and so we’re quite confident that with some work, of course, we can handle the different regulatory and different market dynamics in each of the different states.”
Talks between the two companies began in February, and Next Glass was impressed with the breadth of Ollie’s capabilities.
“We’ve seen a lot of technology in this space — although some of it’s not very good, some of it’s good,” Smith said. “We felt that what Ryan’s team has built is the best in terms of a modern tech stack.
“There’s a little bit of a fallacy in this industry that if you build it they will come,” Smith continued. “The buzzword ‘digital transformation’ gets thrown around a lot, and if you build it but it’s no good, the retailers aren’t going to come.”
Later this year, Ollie will expand to other Canadian provinces, including Ontario. Its introduction to the U.S. “won’t be years in the future,” but sooner, Smith said.
Ollie will join the newly formed Next Glass Commerce division, which includes Oznr, an at-the-brewery platform Next Glass acquired in October that facilitates specialty releases and membership clubs. Ollie will subsume Untappd Marketplace, the B2B platform Untappd launched to connect retailers and self-distributing breweries. Next Glass had been looking to evolve that product, but found nearly all of it was hoping to achieve in Ollie.
“It’s like looking in the mirror for three years in the future,” Smith said. “All the early product problems that our customers are saying ‘Hey solve this, we love your marketplace product but it needs this, this, this and that,’ Ollie had already done it.”
Wilson will remain Ollie’s CEO and take on the role of president of Next Glass Commerce; the rest of the Ollie team will also stay on.
“With each passing week, our conviction grew that this was a really good fit, both with Ryan joining our team and Ollie joining the Next Glass family,” Smith said.
The acquisition of Ollie is one of several deals Next Glass has made in recent years. In April 2020, Boston-based equity firm Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) invested in Next Glass and charged the company to “look for other interesting players in our space, to make acquisitions,” Smith told Brewbound at the time. Next Glass acquired digital magazine and event producer Hop Culture in December 2020, Oznr in October 2020, and beer review site and event producer Beer Advocate in February 2020.