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The Tannery Bar—the Tabor food and cocktail spot we called Portland's most perfect first-date bar in our 2014 Bar Guide—is selling stock in itself.
Through Portland-founded funding platform Chroma, the Tannery Bar is making a community public offering, selling $10 shares in the bar to fund an expansion into the space next door, a large patio and possibly another bar in the basement.
"Our landlord owns the property next door," says Tannery partner Aaron Shepherd. "We were trying to figure out ways to raise funds, make it what we wanted to be with the vision we had for it. This seemed like a smart idea."
You pitch in $10 in regular old dollars, but investment occurs in ChromaCoin—a virtual currency based on the open-source currency BitCoin. ChromaCoin, writes Chroma, is a "counterfeit-proof record of ownership of the stocks and bonds purchased on Chroma.fund" backed by "military-grade cryptographic encryption."
With investment, prospective owners of the Tannery would receive stock "dividends" in the form of Tannery Bar gift certificates each year, calculated according to the bar's revenues. This is in addition to the sorts of rewards customary for Kickstarter funders (whiskey club membership, whiskey shots, special dinners, etc.)
Shepherd says that if they did sell the Tannery, shareholders would receive an amount proportionate to their stake in the bar. But the site cautions that this is unlikely: "Investors will have very little chance of liquidating their investment as it's unlikely that The Tannery will be acquired," says the funding page.
The bar is offering a total of 25,000 shares for a total investment of $250,000; this would correspond to equity of 10% in the Tannery.
This isn't the first time the Tannery Bar has brought in outside investors to expand–when Skin and Bones restaurant became The Tannery, Shepherd says they offered close friends and family shares in the bar.
Alongside Shepherd's mother and aunt, one of those investors was Mike Merrill— one of the co-founders of the Chroma investment platform.
Merrill is better known as the Portlander who sold stock in himself and allowed stockholders to vote on what he did, including whether he broke up with his girlfriend. Fox Searchlight acquired the rights to Merrill's story—and Jason Bateman is slated both star in and direct the film IPO Man.
Be like Mike, Portland. Buy a piece of the action. But for $10, don't expect to vote on what they do. That's not part of the offer.
And please, as always, read the fine print, written under "Risks" on their funding page: "Food service is an incredibly competitive business with no underlying intellectual property protection aside from the brand. More than half of restaurants go out of business within 3 years."
Willamette Week