A year ago we left the UK with a one way ticket, a fairly questionable level of planning and having sold most of what we owned.
At the time, Race & Taylor already existed. But if we're honest, we were still figuring out where exactly we wanted to take it.
Clothing? Coffee? Cars? Creative work?
Turns out the answer was somewhere between all of them.
It's funny how stepping away from the day to day and flying to the other side of the world has a way of simplifying things.
Somewhere between the hours spent on the road, Australian coffee, early mornings, sleepless nights, breakdowns, cheap camp chairs and thousands of miles of absolutely nothing, the vision started making more sense to us.
Not because we sat down and "strategised".
Mostly because we finally had space to think.
Back home, life moves quickly. You're working, replying to emails, trying to keep everything moving. Out there, you spend hours driving through places where there's literally nothing around you except road and the Australian wildlife. Half the time you're wondering whether or not it has the ability to kill you.
It was the days like this we realised we had the time to think and while it may seem obvious, the choice of where we wanted to take it was quite literally ours.
We thought about what we actually enjoyed, what inspired us, what felt forced and what deserved more attention. We thought about why we started this in the first place.
We quickly realised that Race & Taylor was never going to fit neatly into one category.
The automotive world still sits at the centre of everything we do, but the past year showed us how much more exists around it. The cafés where you meet new people, the conversations, design, photography, the stories of individuals and the places you end up because of cars in the first place.
That became a huge part of the brand.
We also learnt a very important lesson: Building something remotely from the other side of the world quickly felt like a near impossible task.
But apparently possible.
The past year pushed us creatively more than anything else ever has. It changed how we shoot, how we design, how we approach partnerships and even how we view the brand itself.
Somewhere along the way, Race & Taylor stopped feeling like an idea we were testing and started feeling like something real.
And while Australia gave us a lot of incredible memories, it also gave us clarity.
Which is probably the most valuable thing we could've brought home with us.
The next chapter starts now.