A virtual pub and a card for “early” toasts. The anti-crisis idea of four Varese inhabitants

In these days of lockdown, even the movida in Varese also had to stop, but there is someone who cannot wait to toast soon, thanks to virtual pubs and discounted gift cards to consume at the reopening.

Although it was necessary to limit the contagion, the closure puts in great difficulty owners and workers of bars, pubs and clubs in our cities. The catering industry is one of the sectors most affected by the economic crisis linked to the coronavirus and many businesses are at risk of not being able to recover from the beating.

So it comes from a Varese producer of gin, Duck Dive Dry Gin, an idea to limit the economic damage of the premises that serve their products. The company has created two special services in recent days and makes them available to managers to deal with the difficult situation.

The first is an online platform: www.duckdivepub.com, a real virtual pub where bar managers can create a personalized video chat room for free. Regular visitors can thus maintain a virtual meeting point by staying close to their favourite bar.

The second, more concrete service is to provide support to sell personalized gift-cards online. These are vouchers to consume at the reopening of the bar, taking advantage of a discount.

Customers can buy in the Duck Dive Dry Gin online shop the gift cards of their favourite bar and save money by consuming them when the bar reopens. “This,” explain the creators of the two projects, “allows the premises to collect cash during the closure and thus be supported in covering the fixed costs”.

Duck Dive Dry Gin was born from the passion of Giuseppe Langella, Daniele Scaglia, Federico Mella and Marco Biasibetti (in the photo), four guys from Varese who wanted to combine their love for action sports such as surfing and the quality of distilled gin.

Taste the wave is the mantra written on the irreverent label of this Varese gin next to the nice image of the surfing duck.

“This motto,” they say, “teaches us to seek harmony with the forces of nature. And so it is, working with a few selected botanists, a product of sure quality was born, which has already found excellent feedback from the public and the critics“.

Guys so full of energy certainly could not sit still and wait for events and they had the idea of these two projects to try to ride the wave to get out of a crisis that, otherwise, risks to close down clubs and places of sociality in our cities.