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It’s 1 month (give or take) into our ‘new normal’ way of life and it’s been a weird and contradictory mix of everything changing and nothing changing at all.
We, like so many other businesses and brands have taken a big hit and have had to ‘pivot’ as those in the business-punditry sphere like to say, quickly and drastically:
Our HQ team have been working from home for weeks now. Our stores are closed. All of them. And they shut down quickly and without much room for easing into it. One day they were open, and the next day it was as if we hadn’t spent 3 years building our family of clubhouses and they just… basically… ceased to exist. We’ve had to change long-term plans around and put a bunch of stuff on hold. It sucks.
But here’s the thing. We’re lucky. We’re still here. The big, important, foundational things haven’t changed and they might even be gaining a bit of strength. We’ve always maintained that building a Community of people passionate and committed to Make Life Richer is the most valuable thing we facilitate. The support we’ve received from our community has been the motivation we’ve needed to keep going and to be honest, our minds are blown with how resourceful, kind, optimistic and resilient you guys all are.
We hope we’re handling ourselves through our community offerings (albeit solely online!), our customer service, plus our business and community decisions in a way that makes you guys proud to be associated with all that Gym+Coffee entails.
Here are a few of the things we’re doing backstage to keep things ticking over in a way that upholds our, and your, values:
In lieu of our in-person event schedule, we’ve launched a Make Life Richer Hub where you can get your hands on all kinds of resources from cooking to fitness to DIY, all created by members of our community and all for free. We’re offering our Make Life Richer Newspaper online for free if you’re in need of a bit of motivation and if you head to the hub, there’s also a small version that you can colour in - trust us, it’s good for the soul.
We’ve updated our website to make it easier for our community to navigate and find the things they want, when they want them. And while we’re still seeing some delays, our manufacturing partners are doing their own best to weather the storm and are getting back to full operating capacity, meaning we can too.
With that in mind, we know there’s a level of frustration when it comes to deliveries, out-of-stock items, a lack of sizes and a desire for new gear. We hear you and we feel ya and we’re working on it! There have been some significant business, product and delivery hurdles to jump due to the Covid-19 pandemic but everyday we take one more step to getting back to full capacity and any challenge that arises is being dealt with efficiently in-house and in collaboration with our partners.
New gear, more sizes and improved processes are on the way! We might be locked indoors for now but our creative brains are in constant motion and you better believe we’ve got big, exciting, colourful things coming your way!!
Our full-time staff in HQ and our stores are on the books and our retail managers are eyeball-deep in health & safety updates, product planning, online customer service and administrative organisation strategies. We remain fully connected to our part-time team (most of whom are reimagining themselves as TikTok stars) with challenges, competitions, friends+family offers and WhatsApp groups so they know we’re on hand to support any way we can.
The HQ team remains fully engaged in their day to day work, keeping things ticking over and making sure that when we are all released from our WFH annexes, that we hit the outdoor-ground running. We’re doing our best to continue to bring you interesting, relevant and local content to keep you engaged, knowledgeable and occupied should you find yourself with a bit of extra time on your hands. The crew stays connected through Slack meetings + chatter, occasional after-work pints via Zoom and more GIFs have been thrown around in the last 4 weeks than in the entire history of GIFs. And, where our coffee game lacks in quality, we make up for it in volume.
We hope we’re doing you proud, but as always, we’re here, ready and listening to any feedback you have for us.
Our Community is a Social Unit and now more than ever, we massively appreciate everyone who is supporting us and we hope you know that we’re here to support you however we can, too.
