Steve Young finds flexibility key to Synek’s journey into the homes of craft beer fans

According to Steve Young, the road to innovation often includes a few detours. A one-time stock analyst turned entrepreneur, the challenge home brewers and craft brewers face in storing their great-tasting beers for home consumption.
He devised an innovative system that would store, pressurize and chill a gallon of liquid in a vacuum aluminum bag — and thought home brewers would be pounding on his door for the product.
Young used his savings and launched a funding drive for what he called the Synek System through Kickstarter.
“It wasn’t a success. Nobody was buying it,” says Young, the company’s founder. “We got about 10,000 messages, and people were demanding a craft beer storage system.
“We were a big failure the first week on Kickstarter. Our team came together and said, ‘What can we do? How can we make this for everyone?’ So we pivoted, and almost every day there is a mini-pivot going on. I think without that ability to adapt, Synek would have already failed.”
Young says there are often a lot of fires to put out when launching a new product.
“We got really lucky, but at the same time our team has been unbelievable dealing with obstacles and figuring creative solutions around them,” he says.
With an ambitious goal of $250,000, the Kickstarter effort was extremely successful, raising a total of $648,535.
“It shows that there is so much pent-up demand for something like this, where people really do believe in getting access to their favorite beer,” he says. “It’s really more about the craft beer than it is the technology.”
Change in focus
Young pivoted the product’s focus to include craft breweries as well as home hobbyists.
“Home brewers thought this was neat, but they didn’t want to invest in it unless they could get their favorite craft beer as well,” he says.
He realized that while craft breweries offered some great beer, the challenge was getting it into the home in something other than a half-gallon glass growler, which has a shelf life of two days or less.
The solution was a new type of flexible packaging that can be filled airtight from any tap. “Without the brewers having to invest in any additional equipment, they can fill any of their beers and get them into people’s homes incredibly easy,” Young says.
The problem that Young ran into was that the original Kickstarter fund drive was only 30 days long.
“There was no way we could contact 3,000 breweries in 30 days and get them all on-board,” he says.
In the second Kickstarter drive, Young says he told supporters that by the time the product launches, their favorite brewery would be on-board and Synek would offer a refund if the brewery did not want to participate in the Synek system.
“That gave them the vote of confidence that we were really doing everything we can to make this thing happen,” he says.
Then, a type of crowdsourcing occurred. Young and his Synek team thanked each supporter and asked what their favorite breweries were.
“They actually reached out to the breweries for us and asked, ‘Are you on-board at Synek?’ Young says. “Our customers actually did a lot of the work for us in terms of getting the awareness out there. Then we do the legwork to show brewers how it works and why it is going to impact their business.”
Disruptive elements
He sees two basic elements to why the innovative Synek system is disruptive to the existing market.
“The first is that outside of our technology, no one has tried the approach that we have in which we created an open source system where any brewer could participate,” he says.
“The second is our technology. No one has developed a flexible packaging that can hold high pressures. So we started from scratch and looked at what existed on the market, why those failed and what other elements we could add to reinforce the bags so they could hold the pressure for beer.”
The Synek system chills and pressurizes the beer, stored in an aluminum flex-pak — a cross between a food package and medical device package.
“Think about a blood pressure cuff and it how holds high pressures,” Young says. “We took the best elements of each to create the Synek bag.”
The Synek packaging can also be used for other liquids from wine to coffee. More than 1,200 breweries and 250 wineries have agreed to support the product.
Synek systems are being launched this month on a staggered basis, first in the U.S. and then in 73 other countries.
How to reach: Synek, www.synek.beer