Building Momentum

Over the next few weeks these ideas matured into more coherent thoughts and then into long, increasingly animated conversations whilst away bikepacking the Second City Divide route with the other half of Outdoor Provisions, Luke.

I was increasingly convinced that there was space in the market for a company making better performing, better tasting and better made energy products. But also scope to go further than that - to go deeper into how it was wrapped, then packaged and more.

I was also driven by a more selfish aim to be able to spend more time outside, particularly in the UK. I love it; walking, through-hiking, mountain biking, gravel riding, fell running, climbing, a bit of kayaking. The term we coined for both Luke and I is a ‘fresh-air-head’, which made it all the way into our marketing.

At the end of a particularly savage mountain bike race season (where I’d also sampled a lot of energy products), I was in need of a rest and completely stopped riding to throw all my efforts into the idea. I can be quite single minded when I want to be. It didn’t take us too long to come up with a name for a brand that was going to provide things for outdoor use and before we got too carried away dreaming about designing bivvy bags and down jackets, I wrote up what I believed to be a relatively sensible business plan, to prove that the idea had legs.

Passion vs Funding

What became obvious quickly was that the abundance of passion we had for forming the business was not matched by an abundance of cash to do so. There are a number of funding options out there but in early 2019 we went with a private funding round backed by peers, friends and family. The ones we wanted to ask were all fresh-air-heads too and hopefully we can introduce you to them further down the line.

This was coupled with a Start Up Loan that Luke and I successfully applied for and split 50/50. Through Spring, with the signing of contracts and the depositing of large sums of money into a newly opened bank account, things started to get real. Not least as the conflict of interest and sheer amount of work meant I needed to take the plunge and leave my job.

We worked incredibly hard with a design studio called Intercity on the identity and more latterly, this website. We knew them before Outdoor Provisions and they share a mutual passion for the outdoors too, which made the process of translating what was in our heads a bit easier. We're planning to honour them in full in a note on our identity and their process later on.