Bløm Mead + Cider

Bløm is a mead and cider taproom in downtown Ann Arbor, and one thing about them stood out to us right away: everything they pour comes from a Michigan vendor. Our team spent the semester trying to get more people to know it.

We started with the numbers, because that's usually where you find out what's actually working versus what just feels like it should be. We pulled three months of Bløm's Instagram performance and stacked it up against a couple of Ann Arbor regulars (like Ondo and Slurping Turtle) to get a sense of where they stood. From there we built out a full November content calendar, leaning into whatever the data said was actually driving engagement.

Our reels started pulling around 200 likes and 35 to 40 shares each, which for a local taproom is genuinely solid traction. We also built out a KPI toolkit early on, mostly because "engagement" and "reach" get used interchangeably a lot and they're not the same thing. Engagement tells you if the people already following Bløm are actually interacting with it. Reach tells you if new people are finding it at all. Splitting those apart made it a lot easier to tell what a given post was actually doing for the brand.

Around the same time, Bløm was gearing up to launch their own take on the Italian aperitivo, something lighter and more session-friendly than what they usually pour. We looked into how aperitivo culture has grown in other markets and thought through where a first-time customer might actually come across it, whether that's walking past the taproom or seeing a post online. That research turned into an info card explaining the drink and a launch plan with checkpoints, so the rollout had some structure to it instead of just winging it. Part of that plan was figuring out how we'd actually know if it worked, so we built in ways to track it from day one: sampling conversion through QR codes, retail velocity at the specific stores carrying it, even review and rating trends on Google and Yelp.

Bløm also tends to see a natural dip in certain months, and grad students are a group that doesn't always think to stop by on a random Tuesday. We dug into what actually gets that crowd out of the library and put together a few event concepts built around it: a movie night, a jazz bar paired with an art exhibition, a late-night yoga session followed by a spritz. We also scouted a handful of potential partners for these events, including the UM Alumni Association, Plum Market, the Graduate Hotel, and Kerrytown Market & Shops.

Looking ahead, we also sketched out a Fall 2026 campaign built around a new mocktail menu, since marketing alcohol to undergrads is tricky but mocktails open that audience up. Seasonal flavors like a lavender lemon spritz, paired with pop-up sampling on campus, club outreach, and a TikTok presence built for that crowd.