Our First Event, Connection + A Great Month

This newsletter marks one year of writing a weekly founder update for you, the Runly fam!

It’s been a real pleasure offering you insights into the brand, the business and also to me. It’s been a crazy 12 months, if I’m being honest.

I don’t want to reflect too much, because there’s so much to do, but I’ll take just a moment to give you some context.

This time last year, we had sold 50 running vests for the entire month - less than 2 per day.

Our website was a free one.

We had only one product.

Our website had only 2,000 visits for the entire month.

Finally, when I say ‘we’, I really mean ‘I’.

But all brands have their origin story. I’m glad we have ours. Super humble beginnings crammed into the corner of a bedroom designing this wild running vest I thought would be useful to a lot of people.

February has been a great month for Runly, sales aside, I have that feeling of just momentum, connection and purpose.

I really do love what I do. I hope that these emails are a reflection of that!

Speaking of loving what I do; last week we attended our first ever running event!

Our First Event Pop-Up

Last Sunday we got invited to our first in-person event at Flinders Running Fest & we loved every second of it.

Here’s me, clearly loving every second of it:

It was a cool morning as we took off from Melbourne at 4.05am.

We head down the highway to beautiful Flinders on the far edge of the Mornington Peninsula.

We set up the marquee in the pitch black of the morning. Before we had even finished setting up runners started the roll in.

My partner nudged me as I was sorting the stock - “Look! A Runly Vest!”. A nice way to start the day seeing that beautiful neon glow in the early morning darkness.

We left that morning with such full cups.

Literally, because we needed a big coffee on the way out for the drive home.

But also figuratively, it was such an incredible and perfect experience interacting with the running community, seeing some runners using Runly products and having some great chats.

Our objective is not to go to these events to try and sell as many products as we can.

In fact, we'd be up there as the worst sales people in the whole world.

That’s not our go, and it’s not our aim.

We just want to connect. And we felt that we were able to do that while still having a lot of fun - that’s what it’s all about.

Plus, one of our team had a run and came 3rd! A great day all round.

Next week, we’re heading to the Geelong River Run. If you’re there, come say hi! It will be a bit different for us next week, we’re not permitted to use our own Runly-branded marquee so we’ll be amongst some other really cool brands in the activation area.

As always, run well.

Robbie.