Hi Matt! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

Hello everyone, I’m Matt Tomkin and I’m currently 35 years old from Bolton, UK. I’ve started a number of businesses over the past 15 years. Some with success and one with a significant failure.



I now run a Search Marketing agency in Bolton called Tao Digital Marketing and a start-up called quotonga which helps generate leads and opportunities for businesses.

The significant failure was VO2 Sportswear; which provided custom performance sports clothing, such as Triathlon kit, Cycling kit and running kit, to clubs and teams mostly in the UK, but throughout the world.



As well as being the founder of the brand, my role within the team was that of Managing Director and therefore covered the majority of areas.

The main areas of focus for me were in the sales and marketing side of the business.

We would generate an inquiry through the website then design a completely bespoke kit range that was always very unique. The kit would then be manufactured to a very high standard in Lithuania (if you have never been, get there it’s a beautiful country).

All of this would be done through our website and enabled us to grow into countries that we didn’t even realize had big Triathlon scenes.

‍

What motivated you to start VO2 Sportswear?

I’m big into my sports and helping out charities raising funds where I can.

A local lads and girls club had a team that were rowing the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to Antigua and I ended up being part of the team.

During the training for the event, we were entered into Ironman UK which is a 1.2-mile open water swim, 112-mile bike ride and then a 26.2-mile marathon run at the end.



Whilst training it became abundantly clear there was no-one catering to the market properly from a design point of view. Every Triathlon suit seemed to be one color and most often they were just black. Pretty boring for a sport which took so much out of you.



I knew of the process of sublimation printing into man-made fabrics so I went about trying to source this in the sports I was constantly training for.



Before I started VO2 Sportswear I had started and grown a very successful business telecommunications company called Comms Consult. It was through the connections I made building this company that the opportunity to row came.



I was always on the hunt for things that mixed my passion for sports, charity, and business together.



The brand was started whilst I was still running the Telecoms company but things took their toll on my relationship with my co-founder and after a falling out we decided to go our separate ways. I then sold my half of that business to him and took on the challenge of growing VO2.



I was only 26, I had a lovely apartment and a brand new 370Z on the drive. Living a pretty cool lifestyle for a young age. In hindsight, I had a lot too young probably as it made me very overconfident in my ability.

‍



How did you build it?



So from initially deciding, I’d start the brand to actually finding a factory who could produce the kit I wanted to the standard I expected it took about 12 months.



It’s not easy getting clothing samples organized from all over the world when the only bit of purchasing I’d ever really done was speaking to Telecom networks and manufacturers who were all over the sales process.



In the early stages, there was just me looking for garments that fit the quality I wanted in the product.



Then I partnered up with the design company behind our branding for Comms Consult. The lead designer was very much into the brand and how it could grow, ending up being a shareholder another year down the line.



The beauty of having a graphic designer and not a traditional clothing designer was that he saw the garments as a blank canvas and wasn’t constrained by any previous mindsets of what could and couldn't be done on clothing.



The only resources we used, in the beginning, were photoshop/illustrator and a very basic Wix website that Phil (graphic designer) knocked up.



A close friend of mine who ran a small but rapidly growing digital marketing firm said he would help generate sales leads via Google ads before we got the organic traffic increased.



This was great as it proved the concept to us.



Later on, we used Shopify to power the store for a while before moving 100% to Wordpress and Woocommerce. Wordpress gave us the platform to really push the content growth forward.



We ended up at the top of Google for pretty much any search terms surrounding custom triathlon clothing and near the top for custom cycling kit. Which proved to be the perfect place to find people looking for a new kit for their rapidly expanding clubs or even for wealthy individuals who had deeper pockets than most.



Some of the initial hurdles we encountered were around sizing. One obvious area was the ladies’ kit. It became very clear, very quickly that a size 8 UK standard was completely different from the majority of places people bought their clothing from. So, I later found out that some brands would purposely downsize their women's clothing range so they would come back to that shop rather than be a size 10 in another shop. How bizarre!



We had to look at how we could get people to try the kit on before they placed their order with us. As the clothing was manufactured to a bespoke design and printed into the fabric, there was no way to reuse/resell these if they didn’t fit.



We ended up putting together a “sizing sample” pack which would be sold at a heavy discount. Phil also came up with the idea of marketing some of the other products on the design of the samples. Genius! It meant no-one would nick the kit from the clubs but also helped us to increase sales in other clothing as they were trying the kit on.



Pricing; we kept this really straight forward. We had a price list from our supplier for all the kit we sold. We just doubled the price on the majority of kit so we would have a 100% mark-up. Some items of kit we would actually triple the price due to the competition charging a premium for that particular item.



We were making good money on the kit, it was the other areas of the business we didn’t manage that great!



All of our sales, in the end, came through the website, we would get referrals from other clubs but no matter where you mapped the sales back to it would stem from initial engagement through the website.



We did a massive amount of promotion for the brand, alongside the search marketing we would sponsor GB triathletes and also became the sponsor to a number of great organizations.



We provided kit to the Help for Heroes Rehabilitation triathlon team called Team True Spirit. I still take part in events with these guys as they’re such a massive inspiration.



As well as providing all the kit to the North West Triathlon junior performance group. This was great for the brand as we were helping youth GB triathletes and were very proud to see some of these go through and make the senior GB teams.

We also sponsored Amy Kilpin; she was a GB Age group triathlete who was in marketing so would provide us with a great outlet. She would write for some of the biggest publications within the Triathlon world. Again great to be represented with Amy.



One area I was heavily involved with was the North West Textile association. They had government funding to try and help re-shore a lot of manufacturing that has moved overseas over the last number of decades.



Via this, I was interviewed on BBC News and Channel 4 news around the time the Brexit vote had been announced. They were looking for my views on foreign workers and also how we might be able to bring manufacturing back to the UK.

