Getting closer...

We have finally received the order of the polos. Imagine, we started working on this with our current manufacturer about a year ago. The first contact was mid June 2024. And we just ended up receiving them a couple of weeks ago. It took longer to get a couple of polos produced than it took my partner to grow a whole human inside of her. 

To be fair, we’ve always said that we weren’t in such a hurry, and happily take delivery somewhere in March or April. Our contact up north said that there’s always delays and we should aim for January instead. Turns out she was right, about the delays, that is. While they have been incredibly helpful throughout it all. That can’t be said for speeding up the delivery and helping in getting our goods on time. This is one thing we've come to understand about Portugal pretty quickly, they tend to overpromise and underdeliver. Time and time again.

In any case, the garments we wanted to kick off with are here and it’s time to open shop. That shop being the second subject of this newsletter. We’ve been working on getting our e-commerce up and running. The design was pretty quick through the use of a theme/ template. But, it turns out there’s quite a bit of content required to get a website to look “finished”. Without having the collection in stock, that hasn’t really been possible.

But now we have the goods, and we’ve created a quick makeshift photo studio (carton box, white table cloth, dining chair, human standing on chair taking photographs, lots of editing), to get images of each item and the details so they can be added to the shop. We’re not super happy with the result, but at least we’ve got it in a working state for now.

We contracted a shipping service, got a label printer in house (so we can print and fulfil our orders), figured out the temporary business structure, accounting setup, set up an instagram account (please follow) and have done a couple of test orders with some friends to ensure it’s all working correctly and find some improvement points. 

Quite some improvement points were found, which is great, but none of them are major issues. Many have already been resolved and others will be over time, but none will stop us from opening shop. And that, might just be the most exciting bit of news we have to share this time. We’re opening the shop next week ✌️.

Technically the shop has been open for a couple of days, but now we’re really opening to the public. It will be a soft opening, as marketing efforts and advertising will be implemented over the coming weeks.

We look forward to welcoming you all!