Is Craft Clubs Ltd Still in Business? (2026 Update)
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Look for Craft Clubs Ltd on AmazonFull story →John Burke and Jon Hulme were frustrated they could not find good independent gin without doing the legwork themselves, so they built a monthly subscription around it and brought it to series 14, episode 1.
Under its current name, Craft Gin Club, the business is not just alive, it looks like one of the bigger wins to come out of the Den.
Beating three other Dragons to the deal
Burke and Hulme wanted £75,000 for 12.5% of the business. Touker Suleyman, Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones all showed interest too, but Sarah Willingham won the deal after admitting on the spot that she was already a paying member of the club herself.
Few investors in the Den can say they were already customers before they wrote the cheque, and that fact alone likely gave the founders more confidence in her than in a panel member simply reading the numbers off a page.
Growing well past a single gin box
Subscription businesses succeed or fail on whether customers stick around past the first delivery, and this one built genuine habit around discovery and a members' magazine rather than treating itself as a simple monthly bottle drop.
The company added a Bubble Club subscription alongside the original gin offering, then rum and whisky clubs on top of that, giving it several ways to sell more to the same members instead of only chasing new ones.
The numbers behind the rebrand
Within a couple of years, public reporting had the combined membership across its clubs at roughly 25,000, an email list past 150,000 names, and revenue on course for £7.5 million.
A 2022 announcement of a £2 million bond to fund further expansion is a useful marker on its own: raising that kind of money is not something lenders typically extend to a business that is standing still.