The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery

WilliamsWarn - A fresh approach to brewing 

More than a third of New Zealand males have tried home-brewing but most have not carried through with it due to the time involved and the low-quality beer produced.

Kiwi brewmaster and inventor, Ian Williams has solved this problem, as well as the 12 problems associated with homebrewing, producing the world’s first personal brewery.  Porter Novelli was the PR company commissioned to tell the WilliamsWarn story.

The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery was unveiled to a crowd of beer-lovers, trade and mainstream media in the Art Lounge at the Auckland Museum on 8 April 2011. The launch of WilliamsWarn received significant traditional media coverage via Campbell Live, Breakfast, Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand Herald, Stuff, 3News.co.nz, Get Frank, Idealog, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Wired, as well as many other beer, lifestyle and technology publications.

During planning stages of the launch, Porter Novelli identified the WilliamsWarn instructional video as a potential piece of viral content and a link to the video was submitted to leading social news websites.

This PR and social media drive has launched WilliamsWarn onto the global stage. After three and half months: ‘WilliamsWarn’ shows up more than 65,000 times in search engines results; the WilliamsWarn website has received more than 370,000 hits from 124,000 unique browsers and currently averages more than 500 browsers per day; the ‘beer-porn’ instructional video has been viewed more than 160,000 times; and more than 20 million impressions have been generated via social media.

Thirty three sales have been made to Kiwis since the launching the $5,600 personal brewery. Despite WilliamsWarn only having the initial capacity to sell in New Zealand, it has currently received 70 sales requests from overseas, as well as 161 offers of distribution in 47 countries, including three major US department stores. It’s also been able to attract further investment off the back of the publicity and sales leads generated from launch