Sorrentino Retail Group Hits the Road
Isabella’s Trip Recap - Columbus, OH | Dallas, TX
This past week, the Sorrentino Retail Group took their first road trip as a team to visit some clients and do some brand research. As Angelica mentioned in her latest article, getting to know the brand and understanding their culture is very important to us helping our clients succeed.
We planned to visit two clients on this trip, the first being BrewDog, a revolutionary brewery from Scotland, with a base camp set up in Columbus, OH for their US distributions. The second client was Truck Yard, a unique multi-generational, dog friendly, curated Beer Garden with food trucks, bands, and a bar that you can find yourself staying at for hours originating from Dallas, TX! Let me tell you, these places are phenomenal.
Day 1 – Off We Go!
We land in Columbus and are dropped off at the DogHouse Hotel, late in the evening. Here we are greeted by the hospitable staff and at check in, each given a beer with our room keys - yup you read that right, my kind of place! We walked through the hotel to find our rooms to be next to 4 massive brew tanks - literally staying inside of a brewery. Little did we know, it was about to get so much better. We opened the door to find that our room had a keg, a beer fridge, a custom neon light above the bed, and the best part SHOWER BEERS!! I mean, this place is like the Disney Hotel but for adults. After many many videos and photos, we headed back down for a drink. We peppered the bartender with many questions on the beers that they carried which ones he recommended and started our “brand research” right then and there - I mean come on it was for work and we had to. As our night was coming to an end, the hotel steward gifted us with the nightly standard for its guests, cookies and milk-cream stouts... again, so amazing!
Day 2 - Beer, Beer, and more Beer
Waking up bright eyed and bushy tailed, we were off to meet one of our new favorite people in the industry, Keith Bennet. Keith originally is from Scotland and was moved to the US to help facilitate all special projects and maintain the brand. He toured us through the production and distribution facilities showing us the hundreds of thousands of beers and how they were each so different. Starting from the water reclamation process to the specific kind of hops, then to the different malts, and to the finished variety of beers - lagers, sours, IPAs, blondes, stouts, and more!! Touring the facility was spectacular and learning about the company’s history was equally as fascinating. BrewDog’s creativity, attention to detail, and drive to be the best makes them insanely unique and understandably explains why they are so good at what they do. Keith dropped us off and we explored their beer museum, shopped their retail store, and of course went in the photo booth for some pictures. To wrap up our tour at the main facility, we had lunch and tried some more beers from their taproom inside of the brewery. Later in the day we visited another very impressive location in Franklinton, a new redevelopment district with other cool breweries, restaurants, and housing. Here we had a beer flight and talked business with Keith and some additional representatives from BrewDog about their expansion goals in the US. To finish this trip off we had to shut it down at a local hole in the wall pub, which was one of the best parts of the entire trip, filled with great stories, laughs, and memories! Cheers to you Keith thanks for the hospitality, that was a blast!
Day 3 - Columbus ✈️ Dallas
After fighting a not so fun hangover from all of that “brand and market research,” we landed in Dallas, TX and hit the road running. Our first meeting was with the insanely gifted, Jason Boso (and then after his Mrs. Chief of Staff, and wife, Amanda Boso). Jason is the founder of Truck Yard which is one of the most successful and wildly popular outdoor beer gardens in Texas. We started off our day visiting the Stockyards and Mule Alley in Fort Worth, TX which is about an hour West of Dallas proper. To those that have not been, the Stockyards is a newly restored development in Fort Worth with an array of cool restaurants, retailers, entertainment, shops, and the brand-new breath-taking Hotel Drover. They also heard the renown Texas Longhorn cattle through the town twice a week offering their customers a glimpse of what this town was founded for, how about that for a nice touch! Ok, back to our meeting… Jason’s newest addition to his portfolio is a concept called Second Rodeo “because it ain’t their first!” It is similar to Truck Yard but with a little (huge) modification - an atrium! This 14,000 SF two story bar/brewery/entertainment monster house offers an indoor-outdoor component that has never been done with any of the other locations. The state-of-the-art glass atrium allows for the place to be climatized for those seasons that are not so beautiful and nice to sit outside in. The roof is retractable, and the space has glass garage doors that lead you outside to Marine Creek creating a beautiful scenery. To say the least, we cannot wait to go back for the grand opening! After this meeting ended, we continued our market research and headed down to Deep Ellum (another awesome redevelopment district) with my recently purchased cowboy hat and sudden development of a Texan accent - howdy! We had ourselves a great time (was this doubtful to anyone reading this?) and may or may not have ended up on stage at Louie Louie, which is a very fun dueling piano bar that I recommend visiting!
Day 4 – Ending with a Bang!
Losing some steam, but still going strong! We finished our last day at Truck Yard Dallas, located in Lower Greenville - you guessed it another neat redevelopment district, seeing a theme here? Here we were greeted by Jason who showed us around the repurposed auto repair shop and parking field that has since been turned into a curated beer garden with a bar, restaurant, food trucks, stage, treehouse, and unique tables all around - including the truck bed that we sat inside of to take in the whole experience. Within 30 minutes, the space was filled to the brim with dogs, babies, kids, adults, grandparents, and everything in between. The wait already started, and it just opened! We tried a few things from the food trucks and the bar, but my favorite item was Truck Yard’s famous “Steak Me Home Tonight” Philly Cheesesteak - in which I highly recommend! Not wanting to leave the creative and fun atmosphere, we had another meeting to go to at the next location in the Colony (a suburb 30 minutes North of Dallas), which somehow was even more fun! Truck Yard Colony sits on 2 AC and is like Truck Yard Dallas on steroids. To put into perspective, the Lower Greenville location sits on a half-acre, so this piece of land allowed for Jason’s creative mind to fully take flight. The added features to this spot included: the Beard Science Sour House brewery that offers an array of sour beers made in-house by their own brew master; a brand new Tiki Bar (opening this week) with SO much fun articulate detail included in the bar itself AND inside the karaoke and poker rooms; and lastly, I sh!t you not, no pun intended, the Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum including over 1,400 toilet seats each with a different theme that covered a room wall to wall next to the upstairs bar. We could have stayed at this location for hours, but sadly we had a flight to catch. This place was INCREDIBLE and we cannot wait to go back! Jason and Amanda, thank you for showing us around Dallas, the endless laughs, and mind-blowing experience! Hats off to y’all, just maybe not my new cowboy hat lol!
P.S. - How We Started Our National Consulting Services
The Sorrentino Retail Group has been expanding its’ network nationally to concepts that they believe can succeed in many markets, and of course one of those being their hometown, Las Vegas, NV. This all started when the group took on high profile listings in the Resort Corridor in 2015 and were asked to seek out the best concepts all over the world. In the process, they came to find that a lot of the up-and-coming concepts needed help connecting the dots in new and unfamiliar markets. They realized that there is no better group than their own to help these great people and their amazing concepts grow!