I feel like a lot of my blog posts are written at airports.
As I write this one, I’m sitting at Melbourne Airport waiting to board a flight to Los Angeles. The purpose of the trip? Expand UNCLE JACK’s reach further into the US.
It’s funny, when I talk about business to my friends and people that I meet how different their perception of it is compared to reality. For example, UNCLE JACK has become really well known for, and quite good at creating really huge online launches. But when I tell people about them, they often think there’s this huge party at HQ and then a NASA-like countdown from ten and someone then pushes this big red launch button in a glass box. But in reality, it’s a bunch of us scrambling in an office late at night with more coffee than we need, an UberEats delivery of dumplings and if I’m in charge of the music, some Vance Joy playing in the background.
That’s why I don’t like to say that we’re “launching” into the US (we are), but now I am saying “expanding our reach” into the US. You can imagine the look on people’s face when I say that I’m off to LA to launch our brand into the US. They say something like, “Wow, so you’ve got a team & an office over there, a warehouse etc. How many cities are you launching in? That’s so impressive.”
But in reality, it’s me heading over there with a bunch of watches in my suitcase, no office, no team, no warehouse & a very very modest budget. No launch parties, no pent house apartments and no luxury hire care. But I’ll tell you what we do have, we’ve got a great team in Melbourne who have been working hard, and importantly really smart to put together a launch plan that could potentially have as much of an impact, if not more, than a complex high-budget launch.
In fact, after we launch, I’m going to write & blog and release a press release on exactly what we did.
You might now be asking, well what are you even going to do over there then? Good question. I’ve been asked this numerous times in the last few weeks including from my Mum. The reality is, if we want to be successful in the US & truly expand our reach, we need to be on the ground. I have three very clear objectives for my trip:
- Meet with the agents of NBA/NFL players to plant the seed for US collaborations in 2018.
- Get an understanding of how people are buying watches in the US, what stores are the big players & how the distribution network works over there.
- Last but certainly not least, I need to understand the styles. This can really only be done on the ground – what watches are people wearing? Do they wear big F-off bricks, do they wear bright colours, or is it neat & slimline? Our whole strategy could be in vein without a clear understanding of the trends. And if we’re not there? We’d just be guessing.
That’s it for now. I’ll report back in a week or so after our US launch takes place on exactly what we did & how we did it. There could be a very interesting story there.
Peace.
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