25 years ago we were sat in a Bohemian bar in Bristol, listening to basey chilled music and came up with the name Rare for a chain of bars that we would launch in the best surf beach resorts along the coast, if we won the lottery.
We thought Rare was a great word, plus it was an acronym that worked with our names, Rod and Rooksie Enterprises (Rooksie being my wife’s nickname).
Even better, we would create a fleet of cool and trendy ice cream vans out of double decker buses, ice cream vans get all the best parking spaces and if we used a bus we could diversify and sell cloths and use the upstairs as changing rooms.
Lets face it, we haven’t seen much innovation in the ice cream market in the last 60 years, we would mop up. It would also mean we could spend the rest of our summers on the beach, surfing and making money.
The idea got even better when we realised we could take the bus down to the mountains in the winter and sell hot soup and beer to people coming down off the slopes, snowboarding in the winter as well – this was a fool proof plan.
You are probably thinking this guys must have been 18, um well no, I was about 40 and it was probably the moment I decided I wanted to leave my corporate career and do something different with my life going forward,, but life isn’t that straight forward is it?
That was probably the moment I decided I wanted to leave my corporate career and do something different, there were a few other things but that was the start of the journey.
The name stuck with us and when I did leave and set up our first company 2 years later, we called it Rare Futures and have owned the domain name ever since. It also gives us a handy acronym for what I want to blog about, namely:
You are wondering if we ever bought the ice creams vans, sadly no, but we do own a VW Camper that has often been compared to an ice cream van and we did end up with a house on the beach on Fistral Beach Newquay for 15 years, more recently changed for a penthouse ski apartment in France, so we did OK.
