Welcome to a new year and the first blog post after our shop release. We are super stocked how the release of our shop has created some buzz in our cycling community.
Nevertheless, the next big challenge is already waiting around the corner, and we welcome your help with it. We decided along the road to follow an organic growth model, meaning we will finance the introduction of new products from our profits—no selling out the business to greedy, soulless investors. We are happy with taking things slow.
Whether you will see more variants and new products in the future depends on how many handlebar tapes we can sell in the upcoming months. So far, most of the sales came from family and friends. Less from people which we do not know at all. We now have to find new Grepp-enthusiasts outside our close or semi-close circles of friends if we want to keep the ball rolling. Yes, the dreaded marketing topic.
In the beginning, we prefer to follow a word-of-mouth approach and to avoid paid advertisements because we don't want to come across as pushy. We believe in building a stronger bond with our followers and customers by spreading the gospel slowly. It can also help us get direct and honest feedback, which is necessary to iterate upcoming versions.
How can you help us?
Well, that's a good question. First, please continue sharing your stories and pictures of our tape and tag us @grepp.cc on Insta. We are starting from scratch here. Okay, not entirely. Thanks to many of you who shared their experiences and best practices via all sorts of platforms, we have a good starting point already. :-) Nevertheless, we need to attract more people from outside our close circles.
Second, let us know about your favorite local bike shops! Besides the social media game, we now want to offer our tape(s) through small and medium-sized shops. In that way, we can become part of the bigger system. Bike shops offer the physical space for building and strengthening the cycling culture. A good bike shop has a solid base of customers who will return even though they might get a better deal from somewhere else. We want to support the local shops, but finding them is difficult. Reach out to us via e-mail at grepp.cycling.stuff@gmail.com or Instagram @grepp.cc and let us know which bike shop we should definitely contact.
Third, whenever you're out riding with a friend, why not point out the super-duper-sustainable-reusable new bar tape you have just put on? Let them touch it so they can experience how nice a natural handlebar tape can feel. Just be aware that some might not want to let go again. ;-)
Thanks for supporting us so far!
Cheers, Jan & Thomas