And eco clothing is not all – we’ve been busy!
My posts here are turning out to be bi-Annual – but there’s justification for it 🙂
Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been up to with Vitalife Group and other stuff!
In the Summer, I posted about our land purchase in Devon and our investment in some limited edition cigars.
Well, the former didn’t quite work out as planned (opposition to planning put a spanner in the works, and we’re back on the search for another, more suitable, plot – if you know of anyone selling a piece of agricultural land, please drop me an email).
Such is the nature of brand new concepts, ideas, and startup businesses – they don’t always work out in the way that you initially plan.
But what I can guarantee is that this concept WILL be tested – it’s just a case of when and where. Once I have an idea, I HAVE to run with it and test it in the real World.
It will not simply be laid to rest because of an early obstacle.
We’ll adapt and we’ll progress, as we always do.
The latter (limited edition Cohiba investment) is working out fine, and the retail market price per case has already doubled from what we paid. We’ll be looking to sell these on in late 2020 when the investment has matured a little more.
In the meantime, we’ve been growing and managing our trading businesses Vitalife Health, Vitalife Vend, Love Health Hate Waste, and our brand new venture Vitalife Threads.
Vitalife Threads, as the name suggests, is our new clothing business – specialising in eco clothing made from 100% organic cotton, made with 100% renewable wind energy, and produced without the use of any toxic or animal-tested inks or other materials.
People often ask why we decide to start the new businesses that we start, and it mostly boils down to solving a problem.
There’s no grandiose, profit-driven, exit-strategised masterplan. Heck, I’ve no idea where most of our businesses are heading – but I do know that they are all contributing, in some form, to positive change.
Whether it be making genuinely healthy, dietary-specific foods, drinks, and natural supplements more accessible and widely available, saving perfectly good food and drink from going to landfill, making healthy options available in retail environments that are mostly monopolised by unhealthy options, or, in the case of Vitalife Threads, trying to help turn the tide on fast fashion, and reducing the impact that fast fashion has on the environment.
They all have positive disruption at their heart – attempting to encourage positive change.
We established Vitalife Threads in partnership with one of the leading eco clothing manufacturers and printers in the World – they have even developed a fully closed-loop solution to fashion whereby when items of clothing reach the end of their useful life, they can be returned for a store credit. Upon return, the items get shredded and remanufactured back into items of clothing (marketed as post-consumer recycled lines).
There’s no escaping the fact that cotton is a massively resource-intensive crop – requiring copious water, and in the case of non-organic cotton, pesticides. So finding a partner that offered a closed-loop solution to fashion was imperative to us – we see this as a solution to both the landfill problems, and the environmental impact of cotton production and the fashion industry as a whole.
Team this with the fact that only wind-power is used to manufacture these post-consumer recycled items of clothing, and you have a product with bare minimum environmental impact – and one that looks and feels just as good as one manufactured from 100% virgin material.
It’s the way, we feel, that all fashion and clothing businesses should operate. But the vast majority do not.
So our plan is to encourage the uptake of these methods by the behemoths of the fashion industry – through leading by example.
If we can prove the concept of a closed-loop solution to fashion, and eco clothing as a whole, works commercially, then we’ll be helping to instigate wider-scale, positive change in this industry.
This is ultimately our goal with this business.
Plus, we’ve been hard at work developing our first revenue-generating part of Wight Pass (our Isle of Wight tourist and resident discount concept) – but we have to keep information on this under-wraps for now. More to come upon launch.
2019 also saw a fair few consulting projects for myself – which were all super-interesting to work on, and I thank all of my clients for getting me on-board to help forge growth and solve problems in their own businesses.
Team all of this with spending as much time as possible with my beautiful Wife Grace, and our two (crazy, but adorable) little kids (one 5 years and the other 20 months old), makes it clear why I only manage to update my blog up to 3 times max per year!
Come early 2020 I’ll also be re-launching an updated, extended version of my first Udemy course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur’ (which has had great Worldwide enrollment rates since launch in 2016 – providing assistance to people wanting to start their own business in over 120 Countries, translated in over 30 languages, and to over 3,170 students), and launching a number of other courses designed to give a more in-depth look at, and guide through, each aspect of this overview course.
I hope you all had positive experiences to take from 2019 and are making progress in whatever areas of your life that you have been focusing on.
Let’s make 2020 even more positive and productive!
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.