Shire City Herbals, a maker of apple cider vinegar tonics, has shut down.
In an email sent to customers this week, as well as a message on its website, the company said it intends to fulfill its remaining paid orders but is no longer accepting new sales and will cancel outstanding unpaid orders.
“Thank you so much for your support over the last decade,” the company wrote on its website. “Being able to bring health and wellness directly to your door has meant the world to us.”
Named for its hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Shire City was founded in 2011 by entrepreneurs Dana St. Pierre, Amy Huebner and Brian Huebner and produced the Fire Cider line of apple cider vinegar-based tonics and shots.
As of 2017, the brand was available in over 6,500 retail accounts nationwide including 4,000 GNC stores, but the company faced numerous strategic and legal difficulties over the years. Last year, Shire City launched a direct-to-consumer ecommerce website and introduced an Elderberry Tonic, its first non-fire cider product aimed at broadening the brand’s platform.
Brian Huebner left the company in 2017. St. Pierre served as CEO from the brand’s inception until January 2021 when he took the title of Chief Product Officer and VP of Business Development Kimberely Allardyce moved into the chief executive role.
Allardyce, who oversaw a rebrand and worked to restructure the company’s finance operations during her tenure, left the company in May, according to LinkedIn.
Much of Shire City’s lifespan was consumed by a yearslong trademark dispute over the company’s ownership of the term “Fire Cider.” Shire City filed for the trademark in 2012, inadvertently stoking the ire of the herbalist community, which claimed that the term was a generic descriptor for a traditional folk remedy and was already in use by numerous small businesses. In 2014, a group of herbal brand owners petitioned to cancel the trademark and mounted the “Free Fire Cider” campaign to invalidate the mark and boycott the brand. Soon after, Shire City sued three herbalists for selling products using the name.
The case came to an end in 2019 when a Massachusetts court ruled that “fire cider” is a generic term and the trademark was invalidated, helping establish legal precedent to keep open the names of other traditional herbal remedies. At the time, St. Pierre told BevNET that the company planned to continue using the Fire Cider term and that “The only thing that would be different is that we won’t have the ‘R’ next to the name.”
Last year, in an interview with BevNET, Allardyce called the lawsuit a mistake on the company’s part, chalking up the brand’s decisions to the founders’ relative inexperience and said losing the trademark “was the best thing possible,” allowing Shire City to put the conflict in the past.
Speaking to Taste Radio earlier this year, Allardyce said she took measures as CEO to “professionalize” and recalibrate the business by cutting unprofitable revenue streams and overhauling ecommerce by moving focus away from wholesale and towards platforms like Amazon.
BevNET has reached out to Shire City Herbals for comment.
