No, we’re not leaving Campbeltown but we have decided to look for a new Watt Whisky HQ in Campbeltown. Don’t get me wrong, we love the office - it’s a beautiful building - but as we’ve said all along, it’s way too big for what we actually need so we’ve decided to sell up and look for somewhere more suitable for us and the business.

For those of you that haven’t visited us in Campbeltown before, the current Watt Whisky HQ is in a lovely old Victorian town house type building in Kirk Street. We didn’t choose that particular building, in fact we hadn’t factored a physical premises into our original business plans at all, it was more a case of ‘right place right time’.

Let me explain. The building belonged to my Dad who’d worked there as an accountant for over forty years so I’ve been in and out of it all my life; popping in to say hello, sometimes doing homework at one of the desks and very occasionally (when my teenage self needed money) lugging heavy files up to the dusty attic. When Dad retired he sold his accountancy practice but they didn’t want the building, just the business itself although they did continue working from the ground floor offices for a couple of years after the sale.

So anyway, when Mark and I started up Watt Whisky in 2020, that was the state of play. Dad had sold his business, but still had the building. The new owners were on the ground floor but the first floor was empty so he offered it to us for our fledgling business rather than having to work out of our spare room (with a small child at home and a new baby on the way naturally we jumped at the chance!) Fortunately the accountants were happy to share so we were all set.

Fast forward through the Covid years (which thankfully seem like a distant memory now) and the accountants have now moved to a new premises so Mark and I bought the building from Dad with a view to creating a tasting room/shop on the ground floor to help promote the brand locally. However the work required to do that and get a premises license turned out to be more time consuming and expensive than we’d anticipated. Add to that a downturn in the global whisky market and, let’s be honest, a slowdown in our sales and it just doesn’t seem sensible to be investing heavily in a building which is much bigger than we need and doesn’t provide great brand visibility since, other than the small sign outside, it does just kind of blend in with all the other houses round about it.

The plan instead is to sell the building and look for somewhere that will be more of a shop window (literally!) for Watt Whisky in Campbeltown and focus more on the shop/tasting room potential rather than the office space cause let’s face it we can run the other bits of the business from anywhere as long as we’ve got a laptop and internet access.

So… anyone want to buy an office?