As you would expect, we didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become one of the largest operations online. Like most, we started out in the early days being offline street dealers.
We progressed to buying larger amounts and supplying small dealers. This, of course, brought with it all the nightmares, stress and hassle that street-dealing brings. We were persistent though and, over time, we kept pushing forwards. Eventually, we starting getting medium-size dealers onboard with us and, as we got more dealers onboard, we decided to sell the street operation we had and concentrate just on supplying online.
The Move Online
We came across Telegram October 2019. Looking back now, wow what a game changer! We were small-fry online at this point. We then got permission to vend in party flock group in November 2019. We were still a very small team mainly just the figure we all now know as APE FLAVOURS doing it all with just one admin, and “APE FLAVOURS” (or “UKP”) the brand was born. We didn’t know much and we had to learn fast. The first few parcels we sent out looked so poor in hindsight, but we very quickly progressed. Just getting 3-5 orders a day had us buzzing, as it was all new to us and it was all payments up front. No chasing down debts. Dreamland compared to what we were used to! As we grew more confident online, we started to look at what other vendors were doing. We wanted to see what we could improve on to give us a competitive edge. We decided to get creative with designs, advertising and promotions as we’d noticed other vendors seemed to be lacking a little bit in this area. We thought working on small details would give us an edge, and it seems it worked.
We have gained a few enemies along the way – as any competitive business would expect to – but also a lot of allies on Telegram. We now have a big team with crazy overheads and we run it all like it’s a legit company – almost 😨😂 We’ve even had to employ an accountant!
