I kid you not. I have found a great business opportunity. The more you drink the more you earn!
Ok, I guess that I have your attention now.
While browsing through something dodgy on EBay, I found this remarkable opportunity.
People are selling empty Bourbon bottles on line for between £7 ($9.10) and £14($18.20) each. I say selling – I suspect in the main they are advertising them not actually selling! I do notice the majority of items are ‘Buy Now’ and those at auction have no bids against them.
You may imagine that Willet’s Pot Still, Blanton’s bottles and Pappy Van Winkle predominate but no, I have spotted Buffalo Trace, Wild Turkey 81, Four Roses Single Barrel and Makers Mark. On some of these ‘deals’, you could buy a bottle, drink it and sell it breaking even!
You can buy Pappy Bottles at about £100, $130 each. Overpriced recycling, upscaling, repurposing over the top of secondary market ripping off.
If you are old enough you will remember when everyone created lamps out of old Chianti bottles, the ones with the wicker cover. Of course, these were made mostly to hold candles and copious amounts of wax permitted to drip down the neck artistically, Makers Mark eat your heart out.
Who might the market be?
Counterfeiters immediately spring to mind for the expensive stuff. Being cynical at the price asked I can only see one type of potential buyer.
Lamp makers and other craft types also is a market as completed lamps are also on display. A bunch of Led’s artistically stuffed in an old Bourbon bottle…mm…
Finally, collectors and indeed Bloggers would all like a Pappy Van Winkle gracing their shelves, not that I have seen one advertised even empty at a reasonable price.
I have discovered this practice is called up-cycling which seems to mean taking some old trash and converting it into something new and trendy, like a lamp. A lamp, what is new and trendy about that? You can buy them at your local household goods stores for sweeties, you just won’t get the satisfaction of knowing you have upcycled a bottle of lovely Bourbon which I too have recycled the contents of. This I will call downcycling. It is also called repurposing, and as some people mistrust the bullshit legends some Bourbons market with, this beats all of that.
I feel that on your behalf I ought to try an experiment and test this market. Now to design the advert.
My advice if you must make lamps to resell you ought also to take up drinking Bourbon as a hobby, the two go well together. One provides the raw material, the other the sales potential.
For those of you interested the range will be extending into snake oil next year.
A word of warning. If you are thinking a Bourbon bottle light ought to be your next project. I priced a string of lights. It is quite cheap but they need batteries to power them. The batteries cost more than the lights.
So there. An empty Pappy 23-year-old bottle light for £300 just for you. Now we are Bourbon fans but I suspect are thinking – let’s just buy £300 of decent Bourbon and drink in the dark, well I certainly am.
