Plan B

Gareth    Planning    

Having decided that Matt’s idea to launch with Equestrian products was flawed, we started running through our options.

The basic plan hadn’t changed, we wanted to scale the site up to ultimately cover everything outdoors and adventure sports related. What we didn’t have was an area to launch the site in.

It was never going to be practical to cover everything on day one. For one thing, we couldn’t afford to buy that amount of stock in one go, for another, we needed to have a resident ‘expert’ for each discipline, as in our mind there’s nothing worse than a company (on or offline) that knows next to nothing about what they sell.

As a team, we all spend time outdoors. Each of us had ideas about different areas to launch in, including skiing, climbing, diving (scuba!), biking, etc. A friend of ours, Gareth, spends most of his free time walking all over Britain and wild camping whenever he can. I was chatting to him about our dilemma, and he couldn’t understand why we didn’t start with walking and camping.

We’d discussed this in the past and dismissed it as it was too broad a range of gear to stock financially, and we didn’t have the depth of knowledge on tents, packs, etc. that we needed.

Gareth sent me a mail the next day, effectively saying: “If you find the extra cash to launch with a broader range than the original plan, I’ll be the expert.”

I did some research on the general outdoor market, looking at major players like Blacks and Cotswold Outdoor, as well as getting hold of industry data, online research into outdoor clothing and equipment and online shopping trends for the sector.

With a market size of just over £1bn in the UK and year on year growth of around 6%, it looked perfect. Added to this, a big part of the outdoor gear market is clothing and footwear, which suited our previous research brilliantly. Market segmentation was also good, with lots of smaller players (under £20m turnover) and only one major player (over £100m).

The problem now was cash… How much of a risk was I willing to take.

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