LendingCrowd financing to raise £350,000 for Pickering’s Gin

LendingCrowd, one of the UK’s fastest-growing alternative finance lenders to the SME market, has launched a debt financing round for Pickering’s Gin producer, Summerhall Distillery, that is expected to secure £350,000 for the award-winning Scottish spirits brand.
The funding round will be used by Edinburgh based Summerhall distillery to expand facilities and meet demand for their hugely successful gin-filled Christmas baubles in 2017. The product line gained massive national and international press coverage, and having gone viral across social media their final batch sold out in 82 seconds online.
Pickering’s Gin has secured exclusivity of scale on this unique, patented product. The gin is distilled from an old Bombay recipe by business partners and co-founders, Matthew Gammell and Marcus Pickering, who established Summerhall Distillery in the heart of Edinburgh in 2013.
LendingCrowd, Scotland’s only headquartered P2P lender, has a growing presence in the Food and Drink sector and helped Diet Chef complete one of the largest ever P2P deals in the UK in a £1.5 million debt finance translation in 2015. Since launching in 2014, LendingCrowd has facilitated loans totalling over £9m and has over 2000 investors signed up to its platform.
Stuart Lunn, CEO and co-founder of LendingCrowd, said: “The financing campaign we are running on our platform for the Summerhall Distillery is a classic type of deal for the team at LendingCrowd, characterised by an ambitious management team at Pickering’s with a fast-growing business who require access to funding in a quick and efficient manner not always prevalent when it comes to the high street banks.”
Matthew Gammell, director and co-founder of Summerhall Distillery, said: “Not only have we been impressed with the speed and standards of customer service from Lending Crowd, it’s also refreshing when you get such a personalised approach to understanding the requirements of a rapidly growing business like ours”.
Marcus Pickering added “The massive demand for our baubles took us pleasantly by surprise, so working with Lending Crowd has allowed us to react quickly and make sure we deliver for our customers next Christmas”
Loans to SMEs range in size from over £20,000 to over £1 million and, in October, LendingCrowd partnered with the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB), the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise, in an initiative that will see £2.75 million invested in Scottish SMEs across the LendingCrowd platform. It is expected that the move will stimulate loans of up to £35 million for SMEs while leveraging significant private sector investment.