We are very excited to be launching the LAB Community Club. This will replace our athlete ambassador program. Our club will be focused on inclusion so we wanted to remove the application process, anyone who wants to be involved is welcome to join at any time. The benefit of this is that we will have exclusive club kit and exclusive designs available for people to purchase at any time, so you don’t need to line up with specific order windows.
The club’s focus will be on community, which is why we called it the community club. We will be focused on bringing people together, and helping people achieve things they didn’t think they could do.
We will be hosting ‘events’ every week all over Australia and the world. These events will be things like in Sydney I will host a Bold & Beautiful Manly swim once a month on Sundays, or we will do a monthly trail run exploring different areas of Sydney, and a monthly ride. We can’t achieve this on our own, so we will be looking to the community to share their weekly or monthly events. We don’t want to make more work for people so we would be looking for hosts who will be doing these things anyway. We will host some bigger events like a 100x 100s challenge or challenges like we are running through catfish now (these are a bit of a tester).
We will also look to host online webinars with experts that can be shared with all members about nutrition or pre-hab, or hearing from a Pro. We would love to partner with our community members to offer a target race like a half marathon and you can sign up to get a program and some company with a weekly run club with others in your area that are also doing this. The program would be written by one of our coaches in the community, and they would be compensated for that. We want to support our community. So we are also looking to set up a directory that members can add to and reference of all our community members businesses, and maybe they offer a special for club members. So if you’re a coach, or a physio, or a photographer or own a café, we want to help share your business. Maybe you go to a gym and they are having an open day, let’s make it a LAB club event and get people to come along with you.
We will also be going off facebook for community. We are working on an app that has capability for members to see all the events available, connect with chat, share photos etc. This will be more inclusive for people and also allow people to connect in a way that is out of the sometimes toxic facebook platform.
What's next?
In September we will be doing a soft launch to you guys. There will be a new website with new product we’ve been developing available to purchase. I’d ask you to jump onto liveandbreatheactive.com and sign up to receive updates about when we launch so you’re the first to know.
When will the club launch?
The club will launch in March. We will have some exclusive benefits for the first 150 members of the club as our founding members.
The Change to LAB
We are splitting our business into two. Our custom business and our retail business. Our new retail brand will be called Live and Breathe Active or LAB for short.
Why?
As we continue to grow our retail brand we saw a ceiling to our ability to grow particularly in the USA with name Catfish. When we started the business over 25 years ago, the internet wasn’t a thing let alone catfishing. This isn’t going away and we wanted a brand name that better reflects us and what we stand for. This change will also allow us to focus more sharply on the specific requirements of each of these customers.
What’s changing?
At LAB we are focused on performance and community. These are things we have already done or were already working towards, but the launch of LAB allows us to focus more sharply on these things. In the performance side, we have been working on new top of the line tri suits and cycle kit.
We are having discussions with Pro athletes to bring them on board with us, we know the gear we have developed is podium worthy and we want to see it there. So we’re welcoming back Emma Jeffcoat and you might have seen we have brought on board Hannah Young who is an emerging pro in the offroad tri space. With more discussions underway, but please let us know who you would like to see represent LAB.
Our Values
The club and the brand will be driven by our Values. We have 5 values:
- Better than yesterday
- Fuck average. Be extraordinary
- No one left behind
- No Dickheads
- Pursue your happy
We hope this helps people understand what we stand for and what we’re about.
When does this all happen?
The actual hard launch will be in Feb next year. This is where we will flip the switch on the catfish website to be custom only (with a pop up letting people know where to go if they land catfish looking for tri suits). We have big plans for launch, if you’re interested in getting involved reach out. We will be looking for people to help with some little pop up activations we will run.
