Today we’d like to introduce you to Active Royale.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We are a husband and wife pair of professional Principal Ballet Dancers (Sirui Liu & Rodrigo Almarales). My wife had this idea she wanted to start a brand of dancewear that created unique designs without sacrificing comfort so dancers could wear them during long hours of rehearsing and dancing. Through my previous business, I had a bit of experience running an enterprise so we decided to make her dream come true. We got started by turning her drawings into actual dancewear and realizing people actually loved them. That gave us the drive to go all-in on this business. While we started with the idea of being a custom dancewear brand, we soon expanded into designing and manufacturing dancewear, activewear, and actually any kind of clothing for other brands. This helped us grow faster while maintaining our brand of very technical and unique designs we currently sell on our site. Today we are able to have a customer/designer come to us with nothing but an idea for their brand and we can translate that into a full-fledged line for them.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
No, not at all. This business has been a constant challenge. From living in two separate cities (we are based in Cincinnati, OH, and the business is based in Miami, FL), to learning how to deal with multiple suppliers, all with various rates of reliability, to having to learn everything about garment and large scale manufacturing, to efficiently manage human resources; this business has taught us resilience and patience. But the lessons learned here, I believe, are invaluable. Even if we decide to transition to other ventures, we will always cherish the lessons this business has taught us.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
We both started as ballet dancers. My wife is still a Principal Dancer with the Cincinnati Ballet and I retired from dancing to take care of this business full time. So we both have intimate knowledge of the dance and active scene. I’m most proud of the fact that my business can take a creator/designer’s idea and turn it into reality. It’s always lovely to see their reaction when they see in real life what they had in their minds or on paper. We also do this with the least resistance possible meaning most of the time we don’t charge for designing or prototyping services. In addition, we offer other services such as customer support/warehousing, etc to help them build their brand to the point when they are able to pay for said services. We are mostly interested in building strong relationships with our customers so we can grow our business long-term.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Mmm, that’s a tough question. If I were to guess the fact, I am an inventor with ten patents under my belt.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.activeroyale.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/active_royale/
Image Credits:
Francisco Estevez for dancer photos.
