Over the next 10 days we hope to lay major foundations in taking Gym+Coffee international. Later today we will be flying to Asia in what can only be described as a hectic few days ahead. Over the next 6 days we will visit Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Indonesia before coming back to Ireland. We have 24 hours ‘rest’ before we hit the USA and begin our pre-launch campaign there!
Taking a step back for a second, we’ll try summarise the last few crazy weeks and how we’ve arrived at this point. Right from the beginning we wanted Gym+Coffee to be an international Irish brand. We’re very proud of the success we’ve had so far in Ireland and the support we’ve received. If it wasn’t for that support, we certainly wouldn’t be ready to tackle the daunting task ahead of “cracking the USA”. Recently, as we shared our plans with people, we’ve been asked a number of times - why go for the US straight away? For us the answer is quite easy, if we ever want to be as big as our ambition then we’ll need to have an audience in the US. So why wait ages to get there! We wanted to launch there as soon as we could. There’s probably a level of naivety on our side but as always it comes back to our philosophy of just going for something, stretching ourselves and then figuring it all out as we go.
Over the last few months we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to set everything up for this launch. One significant element of this is having our manufacturing and supply chain as airtight as can be. With a US launch, we can’t afford (literally) for anything to go wrong with our design process, manufacturing, and international logistics (great buzz words!). We realised that for us to be as confident as we can be, in this part of our business, that we needed to meet these partners face-to-face. So that’s our plan for the next 6 days.
We have a seriously packed agenda that will see us meeting fabric suppliers, quality control companies and manufacturing partners in China. We then will fly to Singapore and Indonesia where we are excited to meet a huge player in the sports clothing industry. Being honest this part is a little daunting but we’re hoping that if things go well here we will be set up so well for the years ahead.
It’s going to be a crazy few days ahead. We’re using the term “nervous excitement” a lot again. We are going to try share our journey and adventure over the coming days as much as we can on social media and especially on our Instagram stories. So if you are interested in tired faces, Asian cities and airports then we’d recommend following our journey this week :)
