Who are you
Start with what you built.
I run Saigon Dry — a craft gin distillery in District 4. One flagship dry gin with local botanicals, pomelo peel, Phú Quốc pepper, lemongrass, and two seasonal releases. About 70% of volume goes to bars in Saigon and Hanoi, 20% is direct, and the rest is duty-free and export samples.
We do about $27,400 a month at roughly 61% gross margin, and I’ve taken a salary for the first time this year. Nine staff, one production site, one small tasting bar attached to it.
First six months of money
What did you land with, and where did it go?
Thirty-eight thousand dollars — savings plus a loan from my brother that I’ve since paid back. The still was $6,200. Fit-out, tanks and plumbing were $11,400. Licences ate $9,300. Bottles, labels and the first two production runs were $7,100. That left about $4,000 for everything else, which is not a buffer, it’s a countdown.
“I budgeted $4,000 for permits. I spent $9,300, and most of that was time I priced at zero.”
The licence, really
Eleven months. What was actually taking the time?
Four visits to a district office that had never issued a distilling permit. The application isn’t the hard part — finding out which of three agencies owns your category is. I hired a local consultant for $1,800 after month five and she cleared it in nine weeks.
In hindsight the sequence should have been consultant first, lease second, equipment last. I did it in exactly the reverse order and paid rent on an empty building for seven months. That is the most expensive mistake in here, and it doesn’t show up as a line item anywhere.
Fit-out and equipment
$11,400 on fit-out. What did that buy?
Three-phase power, a floor drain, water treatment, and enough ventilation to pass inspection. None of it is visible in a photograph and all of it is compulsory. The still itself was the cheap part — $6,200 used, from a brewery in Da Nang that had closed six weeks earlier.
If you are costing a production space anywhere in Southeast Asia, my rule of thumb is that the building will cost twice what the equipment does. I have not met anyone whose first estimate was too high.
Hiring locally
Nine staff. How did you find and keep them?
The first two came from a bar that used our gin. Everyone since has come through them. I pay above the district rate — about 15% — because turnover in production is more expensive than the wage gap, and because I cannot supervise a bottling line and sell at the same time.
My production lead has been here five years and now runs the seasonal releases without me. That is the only reason I can take a week off.
Finding the first bars
70% of volume is wholesale. How did the first accounts happen?
I walked into forty bars with a bottle and a jug of tonic. Eleven let me pour. Four ordered. Two of those four are still buying, and one of them is now our largest account at about $2,100 a month.
Nothing about that is scalable and I would do it again. Bartenders don’t buy a brand, they buy the person who will answer the phone when a delivery is short.
Rent, and the second site
What do you pay, and are you moving?
$1,450 a month for 240 m² including the tasting bar, on a five-year lease with a fixed 8% step at year three. That fixed step is the single best clause I negotiated and it took a consultant to know to ask for it.
A second site would double fixed costs to chase maybe 30% more volume, so no. The next money goes into a bigger still on the same floor.
What I’d do differently
Start again tomorrow. What changes?
Consultant in month one, not month five. Rent the still before buying it. Keep the logistics job remote for the first year instead of quitting clean — I was proud of quitting and it cost me about eight months of runway.
And I would tell myself that the licence is the moat. Anyone can buy a tank. Almost nobody will spend a year in a district office.
