WOW where have the last two years gone! With all good intentions you start a brand to share the love of your favourite sport and suddenly you are swallowed up by all the work you are having to do to promote said brand!!
Don’t get me wrong, we are loving where this is going but the website has been the tail-end Charlie, never getting any love or attention - surely it didn’t deserve that! We have had to try and get a better balance in life as Supjunkie supports and helps others too, which takes up more of our time and really we don’t want to have another 2018 of virtually no paddling!
So hopefully over the Winter of 2020, we will wake the website up with a few blogs about what we have been doing over the last 2 years - certainly not sitting around twiddling our thumbs. 2019 saw us dive headlong back into full on media support for the GBSUP National Series, gathering a team around us who we could trust and call on for help. I’m proud of them all for stepping up, from our photographers to our social media gurus and more recently someone who has taken on the GBSUP website! They are great and I have learnt a lot from them. 2019 also saw yet more articles written for Stand Up Paddle Mag UK and The Paddler - we have been writing for them for a good few years now and really feel part of the family. We’ve met and interviewed some incredible people for both the magazines and get super excited when we have our “kit drop” from them in the form of shiny, printed magazines!
We were all systems go for 2020 but the dreaded COVID came into our lives and shut all the racing down. So rather than see it as a negative, we saw it as a positive for some time off and it also re-ignited Sarah’s love for SUP (after a fancy OC rather got in the way of that!) She has also become an Ambassador for both Paddle Logger and the Water Skills Academy and has really enjoyed the challenge of being a good role model for both.
Social Media has not stopped - running 4 Instagram accounts has it’s own challenges but again, slowing things down without letting standards drop has been a good test. It’s a fine line with all social media to do enough to keep your followers engaged and not letting it overtake your life - we hope we are getting the balance right.
We’ve also just launched our t-shirt and clothing range - we weren’t sure about this as “aren’t there enough t-shirts in the world?” but a good friend said that people will always buy t-shirts, so why not let them buy yours (thank you Enzo). That was enough of an answer for us but it’s been low on the priority list, sitting around on our PC for some six months - finally the range has been launched with all profits until Christmas going to two incredible human beings taking on some pretty epic paddles! Check out Jordan Wylie and The Great British Paddle raising money for Frontline Children and also Charlie Head raising money for Dare2Express.org - you can follow them on social media and even track them live on their websites which is pretty exciting. You know the drill, get Googling :-) We hope you find the t-shirt shop on our website and like where we are going with it.
So I think our next blog will be focussing on the 2019 GBSUP National Race Series as it definitely needs talking about - we saw some awesome paddling and some great results - maybe a blog or two …. let’s see how we go. It will feature the flat water series, the ocean tech series and the sprints (Sarah came out of retirement for that one!)
So, thank you for subscribing, thanks for hanging around and thank you so much for being along with us for our great SUP adventure - if ever you hear of someone we should feature please do let us know - they don’t have to be the fastest paddler or a well known name - we like the good guys and girls, the nice people and will always try and share and promote those as best we can. So, happy paddling to you all and stay safe!
#jordanwylie #thegreatbritishpaddle #tgbp2020 #charliehead #charlieheadsup #gbsup #gbsupnationalseries #tshirts #supjunkie #whatsyouraddiction
