Courtesy / Brickyard Brands
Jacob Eslinger runs the Portland warehouse for Brickyard Brands.
Updated: October 12, 2023
A Portland distributor will focus on emerging brands
Courtesy / Brickyard Brands
From left, Luke Livingston, Jacob Eslinger, Henry Gilbert and Dylan Veilleux founded Brickyard Brands in Portland as a retail distributor for underrepresented and emerging consumer brands.
A startup retail distributor in Portland is looking to expand market outlets for underrepresented and emerging consumer brands.
“The eagerness we’ve seen from brands and retailers alike to partner with us in the first few months just speaks volumes to how antiquated the existing distribution landscape is; especially for emerging brands in the channels we’re servicing,” said Luke Livingston, who founded Brickyard Brands with Jacob Eslinger, Henry Gilbert and Dylan Veilleux.
Livingston is the founder and former president of Baxter Brewing Co. in Lewiston and a 2012 Mainebiz NEXT honoree.
Eslinger has more than three decades of experience working in the hospitality field. As marketing director for the Holy Donut in Portland, he was responsible for developing the company’s brand and executing on a marketing strategy.
Gilbert has founded three businesses and worked with others before joining the Brickyard team. He is an outdoor industry entrepreneur and founder of Back40, a previous startup, no longer active, that operated an outdoor gear ecommerce site.
Veilleux is the founder of Juneberry Outdoors, formerly called TreeFreeHeat. He is a recent Thomas College grad.
Brickyard Brands offers full-service, direct store distribution, with a particular aim to elevate underrepresented brands and founders, including women, minority and immigrant-owned businesses.
“Brickyard Brands is not just a distributor; our aim is to be a transformative force in the local and regional consumer goods industry,” said Gilbert. “We actively seek out brands and founders with a story to tell. Rather than ‘just sticking them in the catalog and seeing what happens,' we provide them with a platform to thrive in a competitive market.”
Broken distribution
Livingston founded Baxter Brewing Co. in 2010 and in 2019 stepped down from a day-to-day role with the brewery.
He then co-founded a startup called Brickyard Collective to offer sales and marketing services such as web development, package design and go-to-market strategies.
Through that work, he told Mainebiz, it became clear “how broken the modern distribution system was for consumer packaged goods.”
Large distributors predominantly focus on widely known brands, making it difficult for small, emerging brands to get into brick-and-mortar retail outlets, he said.
And smaller outlets, like mom-and-pop convenience stores, were frustrated by distributors who sometimes didn’t show up on time or return calls, didn’t have requested products and didn’t think about emerging or local brands.
“I felt we had identified this real need,” he said.
Emerging products
Brickyard Brands launched this past spring with a focus on food and beverage brands, with a few ancillary products such as bug spray.
The catalogue includes cold-brew coffees and teas such as Wandering Bear Coffee and Teatulia, a veteran owned and operated craft soda company called Wild Bill’s, a women- and minority-owned lemonade maker called Little Maven, maple waffles and syrup, fruit gummies, and Grandy Organics products out of Hiram.
With a particular focus at the moment on convenience, higher education and general stores, Brickyard Brands is now delivering to about 60 locations, including Bowdoin College, University of New England, Central Maine Community College, Rosemont Markets, Roopers Beverage stores, Fabian Oil, Landry’s Shop & Save, and dozens of independent retailers.
Courtesy / Brickyard Brands
Dylan Veilleux is the startup’s “road warrior” delivering product to outlets in a 1998 Camry until funding comes through for a box truck.
Brickyard represents about 25 local, regional and national food, beverage and outdoor brands.
The distribution area includes Greater Portland, Greater Bangor and the midcoast, as well as Portsmouth, N.H., and Boston's North Shore region.
The goal is at least 300 outlets by Memorial Day 2024, said Livingston.
Independent stores
Emerging, local and smaller brands might have distributors to large outlets such as chain supermarkets. But it can be difficult for them to get their products to smaller, independent stores, said Livingston.
“There aren’t many distributors who are paying attention to the convenience store channel,” he said.
From the account perspective, small stores also don’t want to deal with dozens of individual vendors and juggle individual delivery schedules, he said.
“They’d rather work with one distributor who can bring them 20 different brands,” he said.
Preexisting connections
Brickyard was born out of preexisting relationships and connections that the four founders had, and also found opportunities at colleges and universities.
“We’d also love to distribute to large chains like Whole Foods,” Livingston said. “But we’re hitching our wagon to convenience stores.”
The partners leased about 3,000 square feet of warehouse space at 37 Tee Drive, off Riverside Drive, in Portland. Manufacturers usually ship products to the warehouse by the pallet. Eslinger is the logistics guy who runs the warehouse, with tasks that include receiving pallets, picking and packing products, and forecasting inventory.
Gilbert is the brand manager whose time is spent in communication with brands.
Veilleux “is our road warrior” delivering products to outlets all day in a 1998 Camry, said Livingston, who is point person for larger retailers and is developing relationships with colleges and universities.
The four had prior relationships. Eslinger and Livingston had partnered on projects between Baxter Brewing and the Holy Donut. Eslinger, Gilbert and Livingston partnered on Brickyard Collective. Gilbert and Veilleux worked together to promote TreeFreeHeat, now called Juneberry Outdoors.
Bootstrap startup
The bootstrap startup was financed through personal funds and a $50,000 line of credit with Camden National Bank. Operations are running smoothly, noted Livingston, because accounts are paying quickly.
“They’re excited to have an operation like us in the market and they’re offering us great terms because the service we’re providing for the brands are so needed,” he said.
That’s not to say anyone’s given up their day jobs.
“We’re still doing consulting work as well — that’s mostly how we’ve paid ourselves,” he continued. “The nice thing about this business was that our first delivery was technically profitable for us, although not enough to quit our day jobs. But the way the margins work, everyone in the system is able to make money — the brands do, we do, the retailers do.”
Brickyard Brands is in the final stages of “a pretty major round of fundraising,” said Livingston, who declined to cite a sum but said it was in the six figures.
“We expect a pretty significant investment to land in the next week or so,” he said.
The first purchase will be the startup’s first box truck for delivery of shelf stable products. It’s expected the company will expand into refrigerated and frozen products at some point in the future, he added.
“We anticipate hiring one to two people before the end of 2023, and five or six next summer,” said Livingston.
It’s expected the four partners will themselves go full-time with the start-up if the next round is finalized.
Why is the company called Brickyard? Livingston said the name evokes a strong foundation and a sturdy core.
A sharp eye will note that the logo includes an image of a Lego brick.
Livingston laughed. “The reality is, we’re all fans of Lego.”
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