We have an important announcement to share with you. After ten years of serving the sports community, we have decided to close or sell our business by the end of the year.

This decision wasn’t easy, but after careful consideration, we believe it’s the right choice for the future. The current team cannot sustain this business with our available resources, and we want our products to live on. For this reason, we are currently in discussions with an interested buyer. We hope to have positive news for you soon.

 

How we got here: the reason for our decision to sell or close AUAU Athletics®

 

Our business began as STEAKS® Roller Derby Accessories in 2014. It was a one-woman show founded by Suvi, who designed, hand-sewed and sold the first protective athletic wear for roller derby athletes. When it all became too large to handle, STEAKS® Contact Wear was founded in 2018 with Rhonda and two additional shareholders. Production was outsourced so Suvi could concentrate on running the business, product design and communicating with customers and sales partners. Rhonda took over marketing communication and customer experience. We were going places! In 2019, the year before the pandemic, we were gearing up to bring our first employee into the team, but then - as we all know - the world changed.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, we tremendously reduced our time working on our business, cutting our weekly time spent on the STEAKS® to one day per person. This worked well during the pandemic as Suvi and Rhonda ran additional companies and did not rely on STEAKS® Contact Wear to sustain their income. The demand for our products was high enough to keep the business afloat and low enough to give us the time to work on the rebranding from STEAKS® Contact Wear to AUAU Athletics®. We imagined this new brand would speak to a broader audience. Our goal was to serve not only roller derby, skate and bike athletes but all women and gender-diverse athletes in team, contact and combat sports.

We crowdfunded our first product, the AAVA Armoured Sports Bra, in 2023. Production delays resulted in the AAVA launching in February 2024 instead of September 2023, as was initially planned. This five-month delay ate away a lot of our capital. Additionally, the increased workload caused by the rising demand for contact wear meant we needed to up our hours on AUAU, which has been a challenge due to the reduced capital. We pondered several options, such as outside investments and even new team members, but have now decided to look for people or businesses who want to acquire STEAKS€ Contact Wear and AUAU Athletics®. We have given ourselves until the end of the year to complete this task. If we cannot close a deal with interested buyers, we will shut down the business by the end of 2024.

 

What happens now: sales, knowledge sharing and celebration

 

While this is sad news, we want to spend the next few months saying thank you to everyone who has trusted and supported us in the past and celebrating what we, a self-funded two-woman show working part-time, have achieved.

 

#1 AAVA Sale - save 30% from now until we run out

Starting today and until we run out, AAVA is available for a 30% discount. No code is needed! The discount will automatically be applied during checkout. It is first come, first served, and there will be no restock. We are running low on some sizes in both mist and raven-coloured AAVAs, so now is not the time to snooze. A side note for all sales buyers: be aware that we cannot uphold the 12-month warranty for all sales starting now.

 

#2 Share what we have learned

We want to spend our remaining months sharing what we have learned during our journey as self-funded entrepreneurs in the athletic apparel industry. We are working on blog posts that highlight our experience with our value-based design process. We hope these articles will help other founders in their journey. If you have topics you are interested in or questions you have always wanted to ask us, keep an eye on our social accounts. We will do our best to answer as many as we can.

 

#3 Celebrate YOU

One thing is for sure: we’ll miss you! We want to see as many of you as possible in the next few months. We would be delighted to see your images and videos and hear about your experiences with us over the years. You can send them via email or share them with us on social (IG or FB).

 

What’s next? The future of our products

 

We are actively searching for individuals or companies interested in taking over the company or the products. Our main goal is to ensure our products remain available for athletes, as we firmly believe women and gender-diverse sports, injury prevention, and high-quality product solutions are the future. If we find buyers, we are open to discussing a possible involvement with the new company and sharing our knowledge if the new owners are interested in working with us. If you know individuals or a company that could be interested, please send them our way.

If we close AUAU Athletics® without a buyer, Suvi and Rhonda will continue working in their other companies. After all, one reason they have decided to pull out of AUAU Athletics® is that these companies do not leave enough time to commit to AUAU fully.

Suvi works as a tatto artist in Tampere, Finland. You can check out her studio website www.teargardentattoo.fi, or connect on social media (IG @teargardenttt, FB @teargardentattoo) to see more of her work and book a session. If you are a contact wear brand looking for a product designer, Suvi is open to offers.

Rhonda has a User Research and Experience Design Studio in Germany. You can find her work at www.thegeekettez.com and connect with her on LinkedIn. She also started teaching UX/UI at ReDi School this semester. Rhonda would love to continue building better experiences for women and gender-diverse athletes. If you are a sports organisation or athletic wear brand actively promoting and strengthening the visibility of these athletes, get in touch.

 

What remains to be said…

 

This has been a wild ride! Thanks to this business, we have achieved and learned A LOT in the past ten years and have met the most interesting people. We are excited to witness the increasing interest in women and gender-diverse athletes in sports. This is only the beginning for businesses serving these athletes, who - for so long - have been overlooked and sent to the children’s sections if they wanted to protect their bodies from injury.

We are happy that more athletes have become aware of the necessity of injury prevention, and we like to believe that we played a small part in that. We will forever be grateful for this experience and the people we met. It’s been real! Now, let’s concentrate on the future! THANK YOU! 💎🖤💜❤️🫶