Notes

The 1st Year of a Really Unexpected Company
uhren damen

So picture this: I’m 22 years old, in my last quarter of college, and content in my new career. My extremely entrepreneurial boyfriend of 3 months just bought me a watch for Christmas, and now he wants to fill me in on his “idea”.
Here’s his idea: Let’s start a watch company. (Wait, what? We’re only 22 and I have no business skills) But he’s got it all planned out. Designs, manufacturers, Kickstarter, social media, profitability… He has it all worked out on a spreadsheet. He’s lost me by this point. All I can think about is how much money this will cost upfront, but wait, apparently that’s where Kickstarter comes in.
Weeks go by and he’s still designing every night and convincing me of this great company. I just wasn’t convinced. I knew I loved him and his crazy ideas, but I didn’t know if I was prepared to launch myself into to the unknown.
Clearly, he won the battle and now we are preparing to deliver our first orders of Two7 watches that came from the Kickstarter success.
Now here’s the reality of all the nitty gritty details I didn’t mention above…
Arguments. I can’t even tell you how many arguments Alex and I got in. Stupid ones, really. What exact color of blue is best for the ticks, the shape and size of the face of the watch, should the social media’s be @two7 or @two7co. Things that honestly didn’t matter. Buuuut there were serious arguments too. They varied about profitability, the Kickstarter goal number, when to launch a Kickstarter, and trying to keep each other motivated through the stagnant parts. These were the rough ones and you learn the meaning of the word “compromise” really fast.
Money. Even with the Kickstarter, we knew there were upfront costs. We are two lower middle-class 22 year old kids. We aren’t rolling in money to upfront these costs. We dove in head first, knowing that to make money you have to spend money. Credit cards took the burden of the first prototypes. Ouch. Once the Kickstarter was rolling, we spent various amounts of money on social media promotion and news articles.
Finally, YES the Kickstarter was successful, no more money problems! Wrong. So absolutely wrong. I can’t count the number of times we went over our profits and budget spreadsheet making sure we calculated the right amount of put on Kickstarter. Who knew you could still be off. Shipping is hard to predict.. You never imagine your watches to hit Africa, Europe, Asia and man, that’s cool but WOW, it’s expensive. Things just seemed to cost a little more than we anticipated.
Late Nights. Our project started in December 2015. I wish I could add up the late nights Alex and I have had since then. Contacting our manufacturer always kept us up. As many of you know, we used a manufacturer overseas. Their nights are our mornings and visa versa. Not ideal. Designing watches, social medias, boxes, and manuals. Coffee, redbull, and a lot of snacks.
Worth it. It may seem like a lot of complaining above, but it’s not intended to be that. It’s just the harsh truth of what it’s like during the first year of a new company. I absolutely love this company and all of the challenges it’s brought. Now that the watches are arriving into our house, the shipping boxes are arriving, and we are FINALLY about to share the watches we started designing well over a year ago.. I couldn’t imagine NOT having Two7 in my life.
If you want to see what a new relationship is made of, start a company together. You grow together, argue a lot, and figure out juuuust what buttons you can push before it’s too far. If you come out alive, you’ll be really proud of your accomplishments.
Check out our website, especially if you love watches, at www.two-7.com.

Website: https://kaufenuhren.me