Origins #8 — Second Trip Home

The second coming

In a previous post we shared what and how we created the assets that will be needed for the first batch of sample shirts, we covered all the things that we can prepare remotely and it was time to organise the second trip back to Bulgaria.

We did some brief planning and the priorities for the trip looked like:

1. Registering a company, including all the legal infrastructure, as well as bank accounts etc.
2. Research whether there is a need to patent the visual assets of the brand (logo, visuals) at this point.
3. Meet with our manufacturers, touch base (meeting in person always beats emails and Skype calls), discuss the goals for the next couple of months and see the first batch of samples.
4. Document the trip and create interesting content around it.
5. Give out the first prototype to close friends and family to test (both female and male models).
6. Ideally by the end of the stay, have some feedback from the people testing the first iteration of the shirts.

We’d also planned to meet up with some friends to discuss marketing and video production. We wanted to bounce off some ideas with someone other than ourselves of what we were planning on doing and get some feedback. It would be valuable to get some advice from people who are currently working in marketing and have experience with video content creation.

It was important that we setup the company legally. Given the fact that both me and Marin had to sign the documents to register the company, it would be practical to manage to do it during this trip. This would provide us more flexibility in the future, so we can plan trips in a way that will not require both of us to be present.

Before we left for Bulgaria, our manufacturers got in touch to say that the fabric would not be ready for all the samples. But they had some left over from testing and we could use that to make a few shirts, that we can look at. That was okay, since the most important thing was to see/touch the fabric and see whether it delivers on the promise.

The things that we needed to accomplish were clear and we were off, yet again going back to our roots to put another layer on top of the foundation for this business.

You can follow the journey on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat. We encourage any questions, advice, or just say Hi (rhymes) Thank you!