Trying to figure out the right products for Gym+Coffee has been tougher than we expected. There were a few decisions we made right at the start and have stuck to them:
1. Start with hoodies - Hoodies just reflect exactly what we want to be. They’re comfortable, they’re versatile, they can be both stylish or practical, and they span across all demographics and lifestyles. We wanted hoodies to be our signature product at Gym+Coffee.
2. Don’t sacrifice quality - We’ve all had disappointment from those clothes that don’t fit properly, don’t wash properly, so from day 1 we’ve been focused on quality in fit, fabric, and design. We actually had tens of different manufacturers provide us hoodie samples and we ended up using the most expensive manufacturer, we weren’t going to try cut costs.
So this is what we set out to do and since launch we have been off to a good start (we think) but these early decisions have hindered us in certain ways too. For example, just having hoodies (ok, and beanies) means that our community are limited in what they can buy from us. And focusing on quality is great, but only if people know our hoodies are quality. One of the biggest bits of feedback we have received is that “we didn’t think your hoodies would be this good quality”. Obviously it is great to hear that people love our hoodies but it also poses the question - how can we better get across the high quality of our hoodies?
So, as we head into the summer, we are planning to take things up a gear and address some of these issues while still staying true to what we set out to do.
New products:
You may have seen our recent survey, you may even have responded (thanks for that) that we were looking for advice on new products. This was a really valuable exercise for us. Not only was it motivating to have so many responses, and such lovely feedback, but it also was helpful for us to get opinions on what new products we should create. Some feedback we expected, like having more colours and lighter hoodies, but some feedback we didn’t expect to be so strong, like the demand for gearbags. So what you’ll see from us over the coming months is:
(i) New range of lighter hoodies (#FleckLite)
(ii) New colours of existing hoodies
(iii) T-Shirts (we’re at the final stages of design and sampling)
(iv) Leggings - This was a huge ask from our community however it is proving difficult to maintain our high quality levels. It may take longer than expected but we can guarantee the quality will be superb when they arrive.
Proving our quality:
Word-of-mouth of our community has been an amazing help here. Hopefully this will continue and new people can easily see the high quality hoodies when their friends buy one. Please continue to spread the word, we appreciate that so much! :)
We also will be updating our website. At the start we wanted to keep our site clean and simple and while we don’t plan on going crazy here we do plan on adding more images and videos to our site. We hope this will give our community more opportunity to see our hoodies in action.
Finally, we hope to give you all more opportunities to physically see, touch and maybe even buy our gear. We will have a big stand at Wellfest this May and have loads of fun planned that weekend. We also plan on organising a lot more Gym+Coffee events, meet-ups and bootcamps this summer. Lots more to come about this soon but this is a plan we are getting really excited about!
We feel very lucky about the start we have had since January but wow we still have a lot to figure out! As always we love to hear feedback, suggestions or ideas. If you have any thoughts for Gym+Coffee please reach out to us. Thanks for being so supportive so far!
