“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – Anthony Bourdain
Travelling is a life-changing experience everyone must desire to have. For most people, travel opens up a world of new experiences, gives them a new pair of eyes and shifts their entire perspective about life. It is this exact experience that led to the birth of Rickshaw Journey.
Bob McGurty, the founder of Rickshaw Journey, has travelled to over 75 countries and has firsthand experienced all the pain that comes with finding the perfect travel accessories to store travel items when transiting. For Bob, Rickshaw Journey became the perfect hub to produce and retail affordable yet quality travel accessories.
During Bob's travel, he worked with an organisation which feeds, educates, and medically assists people in Kolkata, India. His work and travel exposed him to assist the less privileged and grew his compassion for the poor. Beyond working for the organisation, he sought to find avenues to give to the less privileged. As such, when he founded Rickshaw Journey, he made it a point to give a portion of each sale made from the Rickshaw Journey to charity.
Operating under the mantra - Growing, Giving, Getting and Gathering, the team of two seeks to create a great customer experience for all who purchase any travel item from them while sponsoring a child to school and feeding a family with proceeds from each sale.
Growing
After building this business for four years, Bob and his teammate have a stack of ideas which are yet to be implemented. This confirms the continuous growth of the business building journey.
Although plans are underway to expand into a brick-and-mortar store, their main focus is to grow the e-commerce space for now by introducing new products and delivering great services and travel tips for their customers.
He is encouraged by the growth potential his business possess and is ready to explore how high they can go.
Giving
Charity for the team at Rickshaw is on sales instead of proceeds. For every sale of $100, an entire family in India is feed and a child stays in school for a day. Also, for every sale of $20, a child stays in school for an hour and one person receives a meal.
Getting
McGurty is deeply moved when he’s customers love his products and are fully satisfied. Hence he carefully selects the products sold on his online shop making sure it fits the need of the modern day traveller.
Finding their ideal customers mean executing the right marketing strategies. The main marketing channels for the Rickshaw Journey are their social media channels and the company blog. Although this business is a part-time business, marketing is done full-time.
Building the online store on the right platform and using the right plugins and widgets also counts in the customer acquisition and retention journey for the team. He chose Shopify as his main plugin because of its stability and credibility built over the years. For plugins, Bob listed the Kudobuzz SEO as one of his favourites alongside Oberlo, Privy, Seguno, Mailchimp, Firepush and Spocket.
Gathering
Bob understands that to succeed in any business, you need to learn the right business skills, continually learn from people who have gone ahead of you and mentor those coming after you. Hence spends time taking courses on entrepreneurship and social media marketing on Udemy.
He also manages an online community where his customers can learn and grow from each other.
Ultimately, the Rickshaw Journey provides travellers with affordable yet classy travel products to ease their travel pains by storing items on the plane to prevent loss of items, at the same time supporting the less privileged.
Check out the Rickshaw Journey’s website and follow them on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
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