Welcome to the first ever Gt For Men blog post! As its the first post, I thought what better way to kick things off then tell you a little bit about ourselves, a little of our history and how we came to create GT For men and of course, a little bit about the company itself. You’ll also notice that these posts won’t be just about men’s skincare but topics that we find interesting, and which hopefully will be of interest to you to too.
Having lost the toss, the writing of these posts will be up to me so I guess my introduction will have to be first. My name is Shannon, I currently spend my time between Brisbane and Noosa which, for those of you not familiar with Australia, is on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and regarded by many to be one of the country’s most beautiful seaside towns. I haven’t always been an honorary Queenslander as I spent the first 40 years of my life living in Sydney and moved here with my wife and 3 children 11 years ago (you can do the math on my age). My career to date has been mostly in real estate though I was marketing for 3 years in London though that was in my 20’s and my memories are blurry at best.
My co-founder Sean is a completely different kettle of fish being born far from these beautiful shores in the sunlight challenged UK, specifically Bristol, which I am assured, is not part of Wales. Having lived in the UK most of his life, he finally saw the light (forgive the pun) and made Noosa his home 8 years ago where shortly after we met and became firm friends for life. He has one son, a penchant for oddly coloured speed boats, a rain man type of memory for 80’s music and, we haven’t told him yet, is turning 60 next March. In the UK, Sean designed office and commercial fit outs throughout the country and took a complete career U-turn upon arriving in Australia by becoming a professional photographer and , as you can see by our product photos, a very good one.
So how did two guys, from 2 different countries end up in the men’s skincare business I can almost hear you asking? Believe it or not, the idea came up after sharing a couple of beers one afternoon (I’m sure you believe the beer part, I meant the idea part). A conversation about skincare isn’t one of our usual topics that we usually talk about, we are usually solving world problems or referencing obscure movie quotes, so it was unusual for the topic of men’s skincare to come up but come up it did. We both sort of knew the other did something regarding skincare but had no inclination to ask what is was so it was interesting to find out that we both stole our partners moisturisers and skincare products, the reason being that there wasn’t really a decent skincare for men out there neither of us wanted to pay the extortionate prices that women have to pay for their products. Therein was the seed for GT For Men.
Fast forward 2 years, 2 years of learning all we could not just about skincare but specifically skincare for men. Not only did we do exhaustive research into the products, but we spoke to countless men about skincare and about what they do and don’t do with regards to a skincare routine. I can tell you that talking to men about skincare is one tough gig. Anyway, having done all the research, we had developed a very specific brief on what we wanted. It had to be completely natural, it had to be vegan, we didn’t want it tested on animals (who would) and we wanted it made in Australia, in fact as close as possible to us so that we could oversee every part. We weren’t going to compromise on anything so, after kissing a lot of frogs, it was with great relief that we found the perfect manufacturer and guess where they were? yep five minutes down the road and had the compacity to meet our pretty strict brief.
So fast forward some more time and here I am, writing our first ever blog and all on the eve of our launch. It’s a really exciting time for us, we have great products that align perfectly with our vision, and it really is pretty special to bring this product to men, men just like us, who really haven’t their needs taken into account before. Our products are for men of any age but like our motto says, ‘its never too late to start’!
