One thing we get asked a lot is “are you guys going to be in shops?” Being honest, it’s been a question we’ve regularly asked ourselves. Should we try get Gym+Coffee stocked in retail shops and stores? There’s definitely a lot of advantages to it. It would be a way of increasing brand awareness, giving people more opportunities to buy our gear and the main advantage would be that it would give people an opportunity to feel, touch and try on our clothing.
That last point is probably the most interesting one to us. From our events and pop-up shops, we certainly find that when people feel our hoodies and see the quality firsthand that they are more likely to purchase one. Great! :) So this is definitely something we’d like to be able to do more, to provide more opportunities for our community to physically try our clothing. However the thought of being stocked in department stores or sports shops just doesn’t feel right to us either. I guess firstly it would mean a change of approach for us, we’d be moving from an online to an offline company as we’re still too small to be able to focus on both those strategies. While we are so young in business too, we are really protective of our brand. It may be silly but the fears of bad displays, sales rails, poor packaging etc has kept us reluctant to go down the physical retail path yet. We would need to find a solution with a partner we could really trust and that would be a great fit for our brand. So when an opportunity came along that ticked all those boxes, we couldn’t believe your luck! And that opportunity is with Yoga Dublin!
We were recently introduced to Colm, Lorna and the team at Yoga Dublin and despite Colm being more of a tea drinker, we immediately wanted to collaborate with them! We knew Yoga Dublin by reputation but when we learned more about them we were even more impressed. After years abroad training Colm founded one of the first yoga studios in Dublin, long before yoga is as popular as it is today. Yoga Dublin have been a huge factor in promoting yoga across Dublin over the last number of years and have built a fantastic community of people passionate about stretching themselves (physically and mentally!). As this community has grown so has their locations and their studios have become bigger and better. Their Dundrum location has recently been refurbished and we are so thrilled to be given the opportunity to have our own retail section there. It was a lovely sign of support for us and we’re very grateful to the Yoga Dublin team.
For us the decision made a lot of sense. We really felt that our two brands aligned and that we’d have a shared audience. We now have a place where our community can go to see our clothing first hand to feel, touch and try sizes. Is this the start of a whole new angle of Gym+Coffee? We don’t know. Does it feel right and make us excited? Yes! Have we met some cool people who can help us expand our community? Yes! We can’t wait to see where this goes and we hope you get the chance to check it out sometime soon.
