Clarification From BrewDog

We have been a marmite brand pretty much from day 1. We always wear our heart on our sleeve and take a stand for the things that we believe in. Some people love us, some people not so much, and we are cool with that. We have never been about trying to keep everyone happy.

People often criticise us, sometimes for good reason too. All companies make mistakes, we have made many on our 13 year journey and we are always happy to hold our hands up when we get something wrong, and we have done so on many occasions.

Sometimes however, like today on Twitter for instance, we get criticised for things which are completely untrue, and I thought I would take the opportunity to share some perspectives on things from our side.

People are criticising us today for 4 things, and I wanted to share some facts on each one.

Firstly, a trademark dispute in March 2017 with a bar called Lone Wolf, which is also the name of our gin brand. We took legal action against them on the name. This was a mistake on our behalf: there was never going to be any confusion between their bar and our gin, and we were completely wrong to take action.

We very quickly and publicly admitted the mistake, stopped the legal action and covered their costs and in addition we invited them to Ellon to make a special batch of gin together as an apology. We were definitely in the wrong here and the mistake hurt us. Lesson learned.

Secondly, people seem to think we have trademarked the word ‘Punk’ across the board. Back in 2007 we trademarked ‘Punk IPA’ in the beer category but there are hundreds of other trademark categories and we only own ‘Punk IPA’ in beer. As this is the trademark of our flagship beer, we have to protect it, to not protect this would be to put the livelihoods of all of our 2,000 team members at risk. Every company is going to protect the trademark of its flagship item.

By conventional standards, we are pretty relaxed about our intellectual property, in fact we have given away all our recipes with DIY Dog. No other brewery has ever taken such an open approach with it’s intellectual property. Ever. You can download all our recipes here.

Thirdly, a job candidate for a marketing role in the USA accused us of using ideas they presented during the job interview process in 2018. Getting a job at BrewDog isn’t easy and we ask a lot of our interviewees, including showing us how they think creatively about the challenges we face. But we absolutely never have or never will use any ideas presented by a candidate during an interview process and the accusation is completely untrue. It is worth noting that the candidate in question also sent us an invoice us for their time whilst being interviewed which we have never seen from a candidate before or since.  

Fourthly, there was some noise around us using concepts which an agency which was under a retainer to us at the time presented to us. This was all cleared up, very amicably well over a year ago, as can be seen here from Alex Myers, CEO of the aforementioned agency’s tweet.

We are definitely a long way from perfect as a business. But it really hurts us and our team when we are criticised for things which are untrue and when these things are dragged up time and time again, so I just wanted to take the opportunity to clear up some of these points.

James