Happy 2014 to everyone and I hope you had a great holiday and New Year!

Thanks to all Luxco staff, vendors, suppliers, distributors and retailers for your assistance towards another successful 2013 for Luxco.  As I wrote to you previously I believe our top line performance in 2013 was solid but our bottom line performance suffered.  Our input costs rose across many key components and rolling in the Beam acquisition proved more costly than anticipated.  The good news is that our business is continuing to expand and we are gaining relevance which is critical to our overall success.

In the past year in addition to the Beam deal, we hired many new field personnel, re-tooled and added to our marketing department, hired our first new “executive” in over ten years (Steve Einig), rolled Paramount into Luxco as a manufacturing site (becoming Luxco-Cleveland), re-tooled the Meier’s facility to bottle Yago and staffed up our St. Louis facility to take over the Beam bottling just last month!  Not an idle year by any means.

In this newsletter you will see a photo of me with some customers from Indiana who recently visited us.  I take great pleasure in welcoming groups to come visit us to not only tour our facility but to meet our employees as well.  When they are with us they get the opportunity to really see how special Luxco is from the inside out!  The day usually ends with going to a Blues game which all of you know is a real struggle for me!  I encourage more customers to please come see us.

Two major initiatives that I am very excited about in 2014 are the strategic mission & planning overview that is being led by David and the integration of the commercial side of the Meier’s business being led by Dan and his team with the guidance of Paul Lux.  I encourage and ask all of you for your dedication and cooperation in seeing these efforts through.

Most people in St. Louis ring in the Spring with the opening of Cardinals baseball.  My view is a bit different, understandably, as for me it’s the beginning of the NHL playoffs and what I hope to be a Blues run for the Cup.  Thanks for all of your good wishes with our hometown boys in Blue… I hope we don’t let you down!