Chapter 9: Say "Yes" and then figure it out!

Say “yes” and then figure it out from there! Somehow, this has become our way of working at G+C. Longer term we know we can’t run a business this way but at the start this has been our philosophy and while it’s been challenging, it also has been so much fun. When the opportunity to partner with Wellfest came up, we said yes without any plan in place. We said yes to being interviewed on live radio. We said yes when we asked ourselves - can we manage a 10 week #SummerStretch series? And now we find ourselves launching a pop-up coffee counter because we said yes! :)

For the next 10 days, we will have our very first coffee counter in The Henry Fitness Centre on Pembroke Street, right in the heart of Dublin. We were thrilled when Karl Henry contacted us on Twitter, liked what we were doing and was interested in collaborating. We discussed various options and that has resulted in us opening up our first physical space in the reception area of the centre. We are incredibly grateful to Karl, Pat and the team for providing us with this opportunity and we really admire their desire to help small businesses just starting out.

So we said yes! We knew this was a great opportunity for us and we were confident that we could do something interesting with the space. We debated it being a long-term shop, a pop-up shop or a coffee counter. As we’ve seen from the Summer Stretch events, giving people the chance to interact with us is really important but a long-term shop felt like too much just yet. A pop-up shop could work too but we really wanted to focus on our coffee experience.

We have always wanted to have an actual coffee side to G+C. For us, the plan is to launch our own coffee subscription service in a few months time. To research this properly, we decided that a coffee counter is the perfect platform to test and learn what our community is interested in and get opinions about what we are working on. Jamie in Upside Coffee is a huge support and mentor for us behind the scenes and has been amazing to work with on this. So we now have a beautiful little coffee counter (with €2 coffees) for the next 10 days! :)

Please pop in and visit us over the coming days. We would love to hear any feedback you have about our coffee, gear, or brand. We also have some of our hoodies and gear available. We have had a number of messages about people interested in trying on hoodies and checking sizes so this is the perfect opportunity to see our amazing gear in person. We also have our newly launched t-shirts so we’d love to see what you guys think of them too!

We will be in The Henry Fitness Centre on 14 Pembroke St Lower, Dublin 2 from 7am every morning. Can’t wait to see you there!