Wrapping up 2023
✏️ Words by: Shaun Lynch
Well that's a wrap!
Firstly, I can’t stress enough how much we appreciate the awesome community that has built around D&G. Whether you're a long-term subscriber, an occasional customer or you're a member of the Dog Squad... thank you for believing in us, for supporting our small business and for spreading the good word about our coffee and brand to your mates.
I’d also like to give a huge shout out to our team for their commitment to constant improvement. Sometimes it feels like a real grind or like we’re taking a step backward… but they know that ultimately everything that we do is building towards a better business and we just have to stay the course. We’re bloody lucky to have the crew we do!
This years focus for us was to simplify and streamline. It was mostly behind the scenes work, so the details are pretty boring and I won’t go into them here. BUT I can confirm we nailed the goals we set 💪💪💪
Keep reading to see what we got up to...
Our first ever expo (the Wild Deer Expo).
We drove our 1988 Unimog, loaded with the good stuff, over 2000km each way to be there (my ears are still ringing). We met a heap of our amazing long-term customers and got to chat about our products with thousands of new people.
Thanks to everybody who took the time to come say g’day (briefly) and even bigger thanks to those who bought some coffee while there!
Our first ever event at HQ, “Breaky Sesh”
We had Brad Smith, Ian Summers and Kev Schilf there to talk about bowhunting red deer (one of our favourite things). It was awesome to have 40+ people out to learn from wisdom from some of the best bowhunters in Australia.
We managed to capture the audio and sent it over to Matty from Becoming a Bowhunter podcast, so if you wanted to listen to that, here it is: Spotify || Apple Podcasts || YouTube
We switched to a much better subscription app.
Geez our first attempt at offering subscriptions was a bit of a rodeo but we managed to get that sorted by moving to a new app that is much, much better.
You now have a lot more flexibility in managing your own subscription: swapping products, skipping a shipment or adding a once-off product into a shipment (at a 10% discount!!). Makes it easier for all of us!
If you're interested in seeing what products we have available for subscription, visit this page.
We hired Santiago aka "Santi Dundee"
Santi does most of our video work now so you can thank him for the visual feast on our socials now (plus he’s a weapon of a barista).
He’s had a pretty exciting year following me around on all sorts of adventures from the fallow rut, chasing boars in Cape York, wheeling in Victoria, island adventures in Queensland and even chasing buffalo and wrangling crocs in the NT.
We hired Harrison
Harrison is the main point of contact for wholesale suppliers now and will be taking the lead on most of our events going forward. Harrison has a TON of experience in the outdoors industry and there's not many activities he's not involved in; wheeling, hunting, fly fishing, BMX, snowboarding, wakeboarding, surfing and more. He’s also happy to talk all day so I can sit back and… not talk 😂
We released our first barrel aged roast.
Our Christmas Spirit Roast was a wild experiment of barrel-aging some super high quality Tanzanian green beans in a Corowa Distilling whisky barrel. Normally when we roast a new bean, we get a couple of chances to trial roast and figure out exactly how the beans will react and how we can get the most out out of them. With this release, we had just ONE roast to get this right or the entire project would be wasted. Fortunately, Corey nailed it and the brew was a success. We sold out in 2 hours.
We maintained our 1% for the Planet membership.
Despite being a bit quiet about that side of things this year, we still consider it an obligation of ours to have a positive impact in the world. Shoutout to Australian Wildlife Conservancy and Blood Origins for all the great work they do!
You can learn more about our commitment here.
We supported some local community organisations.
We also proudly gave a bunch of product to outdoors organisations including the Australian Deer Association, local hunting and archery clubs, 4wding events and even a school in New Zealand that hosts an annual hunting competition for their kids. Without these groups bringing people together, we have little voice and little opportunity to keep our outdoors lifestyle around for the next generation.
We roasted a shitload of coffee.
We averaged about 500kg per week of green beans roasted to perfection this year!
We're still not up there with the big brands who have been around for decades but geez we've come a long way from hand-scooping a few kilos of coffee for our Drip Filters each week.
That's a wrap!
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for being so invested in what we do! I really appreciate you. There’s SO much that happens that it’s hard to really share all the details but just know that we’re constantly working on being better, offering more to you guys and building the outdoors community up.
2024 is going to be exciting with lots of great projects in the works and of course, plenty of adventure!!
Thanks, Shaun + Team DAG