FAILED VENTURES
In my time, I have tried and failed at a number of businesses, as well as a number of extensions of each business that I currently run.
This isn't the full list by any means but the primary ones are below, in chronological order. You may notice a progression over time to how I have ended up where I am now...
Chris Brennan Fitness
Being disillusioned with a long daily commute in 2015, in the midst of an obsession with gym training and seeing the growth of online personal training, I qualified as a PT and set up social media profiles targeting the angle of "Functional Physiques".
After almost 12 months of consistently creating content around resistance training and creating workout programmes for some friends, I realised this wasn't what I wanted to do. Partially due to not making any money (in fact, losing quite a bit of money!) and partially as a result of sourcing CBF branded t-shirts, I came to the conclusion that product development, particularly in clothing, was a route that I'd like to try out instead.
So, I abandoned CBF and moved to...
XIII Crew
After sourcing t-shirts locally for CBF, and with some brief experience sourcing moulds and products from Asia through my background in engineering, I decided to combine the two and have a go at sourcing some clothing samples from Asia, beginning with some plain white, semi-oversized t-shirts and phone cases.
While I waited for the delivery, I began to think of a brand to gel it all together. I'm quite superstitious and have developed a fascination with the number 13. In 2015, following some coincidental occurrences on a number of Friday the 13th's, I got a tattoo (that I designed myself, of course!) based around the roman numerals for 13. At the time, I was a fan of a brand called 11ing so loosely based my idea on their concept and developed XIII Crew.
During the development of the brand, I began training (and becoming obsessed with) Jiu Jitsu so decided to source some rashguards from Asia, hence Coffee&Kimuras was born!
And then came...
TITE Compression
TITE (An acronym for Talent Isn't The Explanation) was a brand idea developed far too quickly and without enough thought and planning!
Essentially, I have some very supportive friends who supported the launch of Coffee&Kimuras by buying some products off me despite none of them actually doing Jiu Jitsu! The quality impressed them so much, though, that they requested plain versions they could wear playing GAA. Instead of just getting some samples for them, I hurriedly developed TITE Compression and placed an order for both long and short sleeve compression tops, plus compression shorts, in both black and white, whacked together a quick Shopify site and ended up with thousands worth of stock sitting in my spare room!
Spoiler alert... most of it is still there!
---
I think that's all my abandoned ventures...so far! I'm sure there'll be more. In fact, I hope there'll be more. If there isn't, that probably means I've become complacent.
To the next one...