On Monday 2nd March 2026, BrewDog entered administration. A company that once defined a generation of craft beer drinking in Britain, that turned customers into equity investors through its Equity for Punks crowdfunding scheme, that opened bars from Aberdeen to Brisbane, was sold to Tilray Brands for £33 million. 484 people lost their jobs. 38 bars closed. 200,000 small investors who believed in the brand face losing their entire £75 million stake. Hell, I even bought the BrewDog book hoping to uncover a whole new route to business growth.
I’m not one for writing articles on ‘lessons learned… by some failing in the industry’. I’m not privy to the inner workings of brands like BrewDog. You can, however, learn from the industry commentary and figure out big picture lessons that apply to us all.
From what I can tell, the collapse happened fast at the end.
The seeds were planted years earlier, when growth ambition started running ahead of growth discipline.
One phrase in the subsequent news coverage cut through the noise for me:
“It appears that BrewDog grew too big too fast and tried to go beyond its tried and tested products.”
That sentence is worth sitting with. It’s not a post-mortem on a beer brand. It is a question every scaling ecommerce founder needs to answer honestly about their own business.
The most dangerous moment in any growth business is when success breeds the confidence to abandon the thing that created the success.
I know. It was the biggest challenge I made running my own ecommerce business. Pandering to the customers (the market) that wasn’t necessarily my core ‘tribe’. Huge mistake on reflection. Lessons learned, I guess.
The BrewDog Story Is Not Really About Beer
BrewDog’s rise was built on a single compelling product and an equally compelling idea about what buying that product meant. Punk IPA was not just a beer. It was a statement. They broke convention. The antidote to bland corporate lager. It was a badge of identity for a generation of consumers who wanted their purchasing decisions to mean something.
That product-identity combination is genuinely rare. Most brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture it. BrewDog found it organically, and for a period it was almost unstoppable.
But then, as the business scaled, something shifted. More bars. More countries. Spirits production in a Scottish distillery. Luxury eco-lodges. Merch. Crowdfunding rounds at valuations that stretched credulity. Every addition moved the business further from the product that had earned all that loyalty in the first place.
By 2024 and 2025, the company had posted five consecutive years of pre-tax losses totalling nearly £150 million. Hundreds of pubs delisted Punk IPA. The flagship Aberdeen bar, the very first one, closed. By the time AlixPartners was called in to manage the sale process, the brand still had recognition worldwide but had lost what had made people care about it.
The beer was still real. The breweries were still operating. But the business had drifted so far from its core that no single buyer could see a way to preserve it in its entirety.
Why Founders Drift From What Works
Before we examine what this means for your ecommerce brand, it is worth being honest about why this drift happens. Because it is rarely reckless. It almost always feels like the right move at the time.
When you have built genuine traction, when your core product is working and customers are responding, the natural instinct is to ask: what else can we do? Where else can we grow? The core product feels understood, even solved. Growth feels like it lives somewhere beyond it.
Add to that the external pressures. Investors expecting returns. Media rewarding ambition. Competitors who seem to be doing more. The gravitational pull of shiny new channels, categories, and markets is immense when you are sitting on a successful platform.
So expansion happens. Sometimes gradually, sometimes aggressively. New product lines. New geographies. New revenue streams that sit adjacent to the original offer. Each decision is defensible in isolation. Collectively, they can hollow out the thing that made the business worth expanding in the first place.
This is not a BrewDog problem. It is a growth business problem. And in ecommerce specifically, where the barriers to adding SKUs, launching new categories, or extending into new channels are low, it happens quietly and often.
Growth beyond your core is only sustainable when the core itself is still doing the compounding work. Neglect it, and you are building on sand.
The Ecommerce Version of This Mistake
You may not be building bars in Berlin or distilling gin in Aberdeenshire. But the same pattern shows up repeatedly in ecommerce brands at every scale.
It looks like this: a brand builds genuine momentum in one category. The hero product earns loyal customers, strong reviews, and repeat purchase rates that the acquisition economics depend on. Then, sensing opportunity, the founders expand the catalogue, launch sub-brands, move into adjacent markets, open wholesale channels, and start chasing new customer segments. The core product that funded all of it starts to receive less attention, less investment, and less focus.
Repeat purchase rates quietly slip. The economics of customer acquisition get harder because the retention that used to underwrite it is softening. The catalogue has grown but average order values have not. Operations have become complex in ways that squeeze margin. The brand that once felt clear and compelling to a specific customer now tries to be too many things to too many people.
None of this happens overnight. That is what makes it dangerous. By the time the numbers flag it clearly, the momentum that once felt so reliable has been quietly eroding for months.
The question I want to put to you is not whether you are growing. The question is: where is your growth coming from, and what is it costing the thing that got you here?
What Optimisation Thinking Protects Against
This is where I want to challenge a common assumption about growth. Many founders equate growth with addition: more products, more channels, more campaigns, more activity. The implicit belief is that the next stage of scale lives somewhere beyond what you already have.
Optimisation thinking starts from a different premise. The greatest near-term growth opportunity in most ecommerce businesses is not somewhere new. It is embedded in what is already working, and currently being left on the table.
When you optimise your core, you are not playing small. You are compounding the advantage that already exists. You are making the product that already earns loyalty earn it more reliably. You are making the customer who already buys come back sooner, spend more, and refer more people. You are making the economics that already work, work harder.
That compounding is the sustainable engine of growth. Expansion and diversification can play a role, but only when built on a foundation that is genuinely strong, not one that just looks strong because the top-line trajectory has been healthy.
BrewDog’s revenue was growing. They had opened over 70 bars internationally. The brand was globally recognised. And yet the foundation was crumbling because the core product and its economics were not being protected and optimised the way they deserved to be.
The brands that compound over decades are rarely the ones that expanded fastest. They are the ones that refused to let ambition make them strangers to what made them great.
The Hard Questions for Founders Right Now
If you take one thing from the BrewDog story, let it be this: the time to ask hard questions about your growth strategy is not when the losses are mounting. It is now, when things are still working.
Here are the questions I would put to any founder running a 6 or 7-figure ecommerce brand today:
- Do you know precisely which products are driving your repeat purchase rates (use Lifetimely to figure this one out…) , and are those products getting the attention and investment they deserve?
- When did you last run systematic optimisation across the product pages, email flows, and customer experience that surrounds your core offer?
- Is your catalogue expansion driven by clear strategic logic, or is it driven by the discomfort of staying focused on a single thing?
- Do you know your repeat purchase rate by product, by cohort, and by channel? If not, what decisions are you making without that information?
- If you stripped away every new initiative you launched in the last 12 months, how confident are you that your core business is actually stronger than it was?
These are not comfortable questions. They are the right ones. Because growth for the long haul is not built on how fast you can expand. It is built on how well you protect, optimise, and compound the advantage you already have.
Growth for the Long Haul Looks Different
The businesses I have watched compound over years, in ecommerce and beyond, share a particular quality. They are not easily distracted by adjacent opportunities. They are obsessed with making their core experience better, and then better again. They treat optimisation as infrastructure, not as a temporary project to run between new launches.
They also tend to expand thoughtfully, when the core is genuinely strong and the new direction serves the customer who already loves them, rather than chasing a new customer type that requires the brand to become someone different.
Tilray, the company that bought what remained of BrewDog, was explicit about their intention when the deal was confirmed. They said they planned to refocus the brand on the craft beer excellence that made it beloved in the first place. The new owner’s first move is to go back to what the core always was.
You do not want to be in a position where it takes administration and a fire sale to rediscover what your business should have stayed focused on.
The growth machine you are building needs a strong engine at its centre. That engine is your core product, your core customer, and the compounding excellence of the experience you deliver to them. Everything else is built around that. Not instead of it.
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