CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — A day after Catawba Brewing shut down in northeast Charlotte, a business owner out of Asheville has claimed the company hasn’t paid her for service rendered last year.
“I do festivals, and I see them offering beer at places, and I’m like, you can offer beer, but you can’t pay your bill; That just doesn’t add up,” said Shay Brown, owner of Shay & Company.
Brown is an event coordinator who prides herself on working with the best venues and vendors, but now she’s claiming one of them hasn’t paid her.
“We do an end-of-the-month report for them, and that basically takes our percentage out of the venue sales,” Brown explained, “and they’re supposed to pay their part of the venue sales.”
She says Catawba Brewing wanted to honor events planned at their Asheville South Slope location through October 2022, but nothing beyond that.
“May of 2022 through October 2022, we did seven events that have not yet been paid for,” Brown said. “We have sent email after email, invoice after invoice,” she continued. “We have turned it over to our attorneys, and we are just waiting for collection.”
Emails show the correspondence between Brown and various reps with Catawba’s parent company, Made By The Water. One states, “We are working on getting this payment out but will not be able to do so until next week at the earliest. I will let you know once payment has been sent.”
That was in February.
“I mean, we’re a small business, you know,” Brown said. “Six full-time employees and four part-time employees, and, you know, $11,000 goes a long way.”
Made By The Water CEO and Operating Partner, Alexi Sekmakas, tells Queen City News, “We have an ongoing dispute over charges as they correlate to services rendered,” but said he couldn’t comment further on the disagreement.
