Six Years in the Making: Part Two

ChatGPT, a Cardboard Box and Nearly Four Grand

Last time, I'd just had the first prototype sewn by my mum, taken it to the gym, and realised I now had to find a supplier and work out what on earth I'd actually give them to build out this vision I'd made in the form of a little fabric sack. Here's how that part went.

Before any of the sample chaos, there's a step worth mentioning first. I built the entire tech pack using ChatGPT, back when ChatGPT was still the main one everyone used, before I moved over to Claude. I honestly don't think I could have done any of this without AI being available right when it was. It wasn't writing things for me, it was helping me work out what I even needed to think about and what to search for in the first place. I took the back and forth conversations I'd had with it and turned them into an actual tech pack in Canva, with every material and construction detail I could think of.

Part of that was working out materials properly. I ordered a stupid number of fabric samples from different EU companies, most of them let you get samples for free if you just cover shipping, so I could actually feel how everything felt rather than guessing from a product page. That's how I landed on nylon, I loved the feel of it straight away, and it's how I found out you could get it both recycled and waterproof. For the hardware, I went with silver because I wanted the bag to look like something you'd carry outside the gym too, not just to it. I didn't want heavy zippers or anything that read as overly functional, that's a look plenty of other brands already had and a kind of masculine feel I wanted to move away from.

Colour was its own decision. I was pretty set on beige and brown early on, partly to push back against every neon pink and black bag already on the market, the ones that always felt designed by men for a woman they'd never actually asked, and partly because I wanted something I'd genuinely want to carry myself.

Finding a manufacturer is honestly still a bit of a blur. I reached out to a family friend who happens to run Sports Direct in Malaysia, and I think he sent over a few manufacturer contacts, though I genuinely can't remember if Szoneier, who I still work with today, was one of them. Alongside that I did my own research into China, India and Vietnam, the manufacturing hubs with the strongest materials and the technology to actually build what I wanted, and started searching properly on Alibaba.

I ended up with three samples. Two came through Alibaba, one came through Szoneier.

The first Alibaba sample actually looked kind of cool. It just didn't work, the doctor's-bag wired open structure I wanted had completely collapsed, the material read a lot more sporty than I wanted, and I'd had it made in green with an interior that felt cheap and plasticky.

The second Alibaba sample is the one I still think about. It arrived looking, genuinely, like a cardboard box… I couldn't even open the pockets. I still crack up every time I look at it.

Then there was Szoneier. That one came through properly, structured, functional, super close to what I'd pictured. It really was a stroke of luck, and I found out later they manufacture for brands like Under Armour and Nike, which explained a lot. Shoutout here to Nancy, my contact there, who still opens every single WhatsApp with "dear sister." Small thing, but it's stuck with me the whole way through.

The one thing that first sample got wrong was the hardware. It came with black plastic D-rings and zipper pulls, and I didn't want any black on the bag at all, so I knew silver metal hardware would look sleeker and less like every other "functional" gym brand out there.

So we went again for a second round with silver hardware, and that's when it finally started looking like STÆRKE.

A lot of the finer details weren't just me deciding alone though. Once that first Szoneier sample came back, I ran polls on Instagram about almost everything that was still up for grabs, metal zipper or plastic, black hardware or another colour, what colour the embroidered logo should actually be. I wanted people brought into the process from the very start, not just shown a finished bag one day out of nowhere. If you want to see all of that play out in real time, it's still there, my very first posts on @staerkegym.

Once that second sample landed, I stopped testing and went straight to production. 200 units, on a manufacturer I'd used exactly once, funded by four grand of my own savings (rip), with zero idea whether a single person besides me would actually want one.

Next: what happens when 200 gym bags you paid for out of your own pocket actually turn up.