Why Fetch? The story behind the name
A delivery pulls up, and someone in the pub says “oh, Fetch is here.” That’s me. This is where it all comes from.
There’s a moment that still makes me smile every time it happens.
I pull the van up outside a pub, start unloading the week’s order, and someone spots me through the window. “Ah, Fetch is here with the drinks.” Not “the delivery’s here,” not “Fetch The Drinks is here.” Just Fetch. Like it’s my actual name.
Which, in a way, it is.
Where the name came from
Fetch was my nickname at school, and like most good nicknames it came from something completely daft.
I played a lot of rugby, and at that age everyone gets called by their surname. The trouble is mine is McFetrich, which is a bit of a mouthful to be yelling across a pitch. One day at the end of training, one of the lads just went, “I can’t be doing with McFetrich – we need a better name for you.” And then, more or less in the same breath: “Fetch.” That was it. Decided there and then. It stuck through school, followed me through university, and it’s still what people call me at work today.
So when Dad was setting up the business and explaining to the family what he’d actually be doing – driving around delivering cider to pubs – someone said, “so you’re basically fetching the drinks then?” And that was that. Fetch The Drinks was born, right there at the kitchen table.
I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the only option. For a while “Cellar McFetrich” was in the running, a play on the wine-seller thing a few wholesalers do. But McFetrich wasn’t any catchier as a business name than it was on a rugby pitch, so Fetch The Drinks won out. We’ve had more compliments on that name than on almost anything else we do, which tells you something.
The best part is that it’s taken on a life of its own. Customers now use “Fetch” as shorthand for the whole thing; the van, the delivery, me, the business, all rolled into one. I never planned that. It just happened, because that’s how people talk about a business they actually know rather than one they just buy from. And I love it.
A proper family business
Dad, Sean, started Fetch The Drinks thirteen years ago, and the way it began tells you everything about how it still runs.
He’d been working for a monastic brewery up in North Yorkshire, the kind of place that had its own orchard and made its own cider alongside the beer. When my parents decided to move back down to the seaside, where Dad was born and where the two of them first met, he had an idea: he could take the beer and cider he’d been working with up north and get it into pubs down here. That was the start of it.
From there it grew into something bigger than one producer. Dad realised there were loads of brilliant small makers who just wanted to focus on making the stuff, and needed someone to handle the logistics, the getting-it-out-there part. And on the other side, festivals, pubs and bars wanted a proper range but found it a hassle to deal with a dozen small producers one by one. So Dad became the person in the middle: one call, one delivery, one invoice, twenty different ciders. That’s the niche. That’s the fetching of the drinks.
Thirteen years later he’s still the heart of it, and working alongside him every day is genuinely one of the best things about having come back to the business.
And it really is a family effort. There’s Dad, my mum Lilibet, me, and my three siblings, Annabel, Jonty and Dom. Everyone’s ended up pulled into the cider at some point, even the ones who’ve gone off in completely different directions.
My two brothers both work in motorsport now, one in Formula E, the other in Formula 1. So while I’m loading kegs into a van in Dorset, they’re off at racetracks around the world. But cider has a funny way of pulling everyone back in. They still muck in at the warehouse over the holidays, packing boxes, same as they did in the early days. Back then we’d take the cider round every show we could get to, trying to get the name out there. The Dorset Steam Show is the one I remember best, all of us behind the bar for the whole weekend, the ciders flying out. Hard work, but some of the best fun we’ve had.
My sister Annabel is an army wife, and she’s just had her first baby, the newest member of the family and, who knows, maybe the future of the company one day. By any reasonable measure she’s got quite enough on. And yet she’s the one quietly keeping our social media going behind the scenes, firing over photos and helping shape how we show up online. That’s the thing about a family business: nobody’s really off the clock, and somehow nobody minds.
Why any of this matters
I could tell you about our range, or our service, or the fact that you can get 250 different craft drinks on one delivery and one invoice. All true, all on the website.
But the reason I wanted to tell you the Fetch story instead is that it gets at something the product list can’t. When you order from us, you’re not opening an account with a distribution centre. You’re getting me, or Dad, turning up in a van we loaded ourselves, with drinks from producers we’ve met and chosen. If something’s wrong, you’re talking to the person who can fix it, usually the same day, often at your door.
That’s why we still deliver everything locally ourselves, week in, week out. It’s slower and harder than handing it to a courier, and we wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s how you get to know your customers properly, enough that they stop calling you “the delivery” and start calling you Fetch.
So next time the van pulls up and someone shouts it across the bar, you’ll know where it came from. A daft rugby nickname, a family that can’t quite escape the drinks trade, and thirteen years of turning up in person.
See you next week.
— Alex (“Fetch”)
