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Enrich Your Life with Revive Active The Part Kenny Show on news talk with Marter Private Network during current restrictions. Don't ignore your health concerns. Our expert team is ready to help. Well, as you know here on News Talk, we're supporting local Irish businesses in the lead up to Christmas. We've been talking to a number of them from all around the place. And we're giving our listeners the chance to win a voucher every day to spend on the featured local business.

You can enter by texting local to five through one to six at a cost of 30 cents. And today, I'm joined by German McSweeny, co-owner of Jim Plus Coffee. Good morning and welcome, Lauren.

Thanks very much for having me on the show. Yeah, I'm familiar with your stuff and your idea because at the girls here at home are great fans of your material.

But tell us what the concept is when you started and how it all began.

Sure. That's great to hear. By the way, thanks for that. And so, Jim, plus coffee, you know, at its essence is an athleisure clothing company. So what athleisure is, is the kind of crossover category between sportswear loungewear and casual wear. So it's it's only about seven or eight years old. We started in twenty seventeen as purely as a as an online business. And since then we've grown to five stores in Ireland and one store in London.

So they are currently presumably closed, are they, but will open I mean, you want a presence on the High Street?

Absolutely, absolutely. We we did the first 18 months of the business purely online. And then we we we opened our first Pop-Up store in Dundrum Town Center, and that went really well. So retail has actually been, you know, really, really strong channel for us. And and yet, unfortunately, we've had to close those stores twice this year, but we've actually opened three new stores in between the two lockdowns because that's how important that is, is for us and how we continue to grow the business.

So, yeah, unusual times and obviously quite challenging times, you know, to close those stores. But very much looking forward to the first of the December in Ireland and the second of December in the U.K. when the stores come back.

And when you talk about we had there are three of you who founded the business and you all bring different skills to the party. Absolutely.

And it was a great thing to be able to start a business first business. Actually, the three of us were involved in starting a business with friends. And my background is in advertising and marketing. And Nihil brings the kind of sales and tech experience. And Karl has great experience in the in the clothing industry amongst amongst other things like fitness and banking. So there's a good, varied, varied background for all of us there. Yeah, now the clothes, the athletic wear that you know, can cross the barrier between just hanging around, watching telly at home or actually taking the exercise and being out there, it's, as you say, cross over a clothing usable in so many ways.

Where does the coffee come in?

Yeah, we get asked that question a lot. We also get asked where is our gym and where's our coffee? And we have neither of those things. So, yeah, gym plus coffee is quite a funny name and I suppose it's stood out and obviously has done quite, quite well for us since we started a couple of years ago. But really what we're trying to capture with that name is our passion. And our passion is to encourage active, healthy lifestyles, a lifestyle that encourages people to socialise around exercise.

I thought it was quite interesting how James made, you know, in your last segment to talking about how the pope needs to evolve. And I think that, you know, health and wellness trends are changing and people are looking for different types of places to socialize. And really, that's what we've been trying to to encourage over the last few years. It's why we alongside, you know, selling the range of clothing we actually put on, you know, dozens of events every year to encourage people to actually live that lifestyle and and make life richer is what we call that.

Yeah.

So so go for a run or a yoga class or whatever it might be on a Sunday morning and then meet the gang for coffee and that sort of thing. That's the vibe that you want your best selling lines at the moment.

Yeah, we've we've a couple of different lines. Well, we've a lot of different collections now at this point are our women's bodies are always our top sellers, which is, I suppose, a testament to how women in an age bracket of twenty five to 40 year olds are really driving this health and wellness trend generally. And more recently, actually, we we launched our first sustainable collection. And so it's a fluid collection made from recycled materials. It's something that we've been working on for over a year now.

So we're delighted to be able to bring that out. And it's kind of really on the back of a lot of work we've been doing around sustainability, around the people who work in our company and the types of organisations that we that we partner with, such as the Sanctuary Runners, which is an organisation which gives people in direct provision the opportunity to socialise around, exercise with Irish people so that they can develop relationships in their local community.

And finally, if people want to order stuff online from you at the moment before your shops open, where do they go?

Yeah, they go to the gym plus coffee dotcom. So and Pellew best coffee dotcom and hopefully the stores all going well. We'll be back open on the 1st of December. So we have three stores in Dublin, one in Cork and one in Limerick. And and we really do appreciate all the support that we're getting at the moment. It's been a challenging year for everybody, so it's great to see so many people rallying around Irish businesses. Great stuff.

Well, Jim Coffee is the website and Gerard McSweeny, co-owner of Gimbals Coffee, thank you very much for joining us.

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