Revive Infruition: Aid Brad Smith's Business

Hi, my name is Stephanie, I'm Brad's fiancé. Together we live in west Asheville with our daughter, Sophie. I'm hoping to raise funds for Infruition Tea and owner Brad Smith to aid and recover from loss of business sales and personal income due to Hurricane Helene. While we did not lose a storefront, our business losses are multifactorial. October is usually one of the busiest months here and Infruition has had a significant loss of sales. Any further production of Infruition is currently paused until potable water is available at Pisgah Brewing Company in Black Mountain, where we brew our teas. City officials cannot give an exact timeline of when this will be. Infruition is mainly a wholesale operation; many of our wholesale accounts have been severely impacted and are not in operation or operation has been paused or limited. 80% of our customers are based in Western North Carolina. Sadly, we lost several accounts in the River Arts District alone. Distribution routes have been impacted in both WNC and Tennessee. Loss of tourism to the area and the increased houselessness and unemployment have impacted our sales severely. We just started working with Blue Mountain Distributors to service Ingles, who unfortunately lost their warehouse, trucks, and personal vehicles. As a small business owner, Brad is not eligible for unemployment; our SBA application is on hold until congress approves additional funding for hurricane relief; we have yet to hear back from Mountain BizWorks. Thankfully we do have available product for sale (please consider purchasing), so we are hopeful we can keep our product in the market for the long run. We are hopeful our business partners recover as well and are deeply saddened by the losses to our community that we love being a part of. Your funds will go directly to keeping Infruition Tea in operation while our community recovers in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Our immediate needs are funds for paying our suppliers (some of which are local businesses as well), purchasing ingredients to brew so we can resume production once potable water is fully restored, marketing, website development, demos, and distribution related expenses. Any amount of funds will ensure we are able to keep day to day operations up and running. If you are unable to donate please consider sharing this fundraiser to share our story and raise awareness to the hurdles many small businesses in the area are also facing. Thank you. ♡