Interview with Nick van Mourik, co-owner Cheaque

‘Ou le Wappeur’, ‘Paire de Loule’ en ‘Couqe Bâqeur’, these are a couple of the remarkable texts on the clothing of Cheaque, a company that was founded five years ago by three guys. Craving to know more about this young company, we spoke to Nick van Mourik, one of the founders and responsible for Marketing and Sales for this rapidly growing company.

Can you tell us something about yourself?

‘’I started with Marketing and Communication at the MBO. Consequently, I proceeded with Commercial Economics at the HBO, which I did not finish. I felt I had developed myself enough and thought that I could achieve more while working. I was working 4 days a week, and went to school once a week. I think I went through every possible way of studying during my period at school: Full-time to Part-time, from Part-time to blended learning (here you go to school once every three months). This was perfect: the education was not demanding, so I could easily work 5 days a week. However, if you do this for a longer period of time, then the motivation to go to school disappears. If the pressure to perform is absent, you will never commit fully. The idea of Cheaque started to emerge, and then I knew for sure I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Things evolved quickly after that.’’

How did Cheaque start?

‘’Even though everything we do is funny, Cheaque never started out as a joke. From the beginning we all have been working on the company very seriously, and we all believed we could become huge. ‘Bal que Jus’ was our first design. Co-founder Tom, creative brain of the company, thought of this text. After that we came up with ‘Paire de Loule’, and quickly we were able to have a collection of 8 shirts. One with Cheaque, on with a breast pocket, and in our eyes a lot of fashion designs. Back then T-shirts with French designs sold the best, and then we knew we had our hands on something special.’’

‘’Upcoming June is our 5 year anniversary, but most people know us since June 2015. That was the month where Mitchell Dijks wore our ‘Pair de Loule’ shirt during the presentation of his transfer to Ajax. We knew Dijks from the time he played at Willem II, and we immediately had a good connection. We did a photoshoot back then, and kept in touch. That notorious day in June he send us a selfie wearing our T-shirt with the text ‘surprise’. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but the next day my phone exploded. On various social media and websites a photo appeared of Frank de Boer, Mark Overmars and Mitchell Dijks in the Arena, on which he was wearing our ‘Pair de Loule’ shirt! This is also the pictures that made us nationally famous. Every minute the amount of responses increased, and people were wondering where the T-shirt came from. That day is still a historic day in Cheaque history, we ran out of inventory the same night.’’

‘’The biggest question people always have is: ‘When do you run out of words?’. Well, never.”

‘’Luckily we were already a real business back then, so we were able to catch up with backorders. We communicated honestly and openly with our customers about the quantity of orders, and that worked out well. When we exploded that week we thought: if ‘Paire de Loule’ is our only success, we will at least have a good story to tell, but let this be the base of everything we create from now on.’’

Cheaque clearly benefited from Social Media. In what way do you use that?

‘’We started out by creating our own network of nice and helpful Dutch celebrities, who wear our clothes in a ‘chic’ way. The response to this was great, so these celebrities started inviting their friends: Leo Alkemade is a great example of this. The strategy is shortly put: we want to make people smile. First just through clothing, but over the course of time we became a real label. Humor can be found in everything we do or post online.’’

‘’Moreover, we are noticing a real shift in target group. We offer clothing from size 56 (babies) to XXL. Therefore, the real target group is difficult to define, because it is very broad, and we offer basically everything. Some groups are easy to reach, but don’t buy anything. Other groups are more difficult to reach, but might buy something for family or friends. It is important that we quickly adjust to trends and show our collection. Nonetheless, we will keep making great things, in our own way. We want keep creating memories with our customers. For example, once we went into the neighborhoods by car, and handed out our own champagne to students who graduated.’’

Was it difficult to grow after the initial success?

‘’The biggest question people always have is: ‘When do you run out of words?’. Well, never. We have a gigantic list with potential sayings. It was always important to us to keep topping our last success, to stick in people’s minds. After ‘Ou le Wappeur’, people started realizing that we were more than just one hit, and customers started to contribute. To this day we still receive suggestions from customers daily. The fact that people send these in is very important to us. If a customer comes up with a shirt, their social circle will want to buy one as well. ‘Pan n’est Couque’ and ‘Couqe Bâqeur’ are great examples of that. Furthermore, we always ask our customers to take photos wearing our shirts, so we can be a real ‘for us, by us’ social media channel. We really believe we have a connection with people who are wearing our clothing’’

Are you working on an international expansion?

‘’Definitely, we investigated what would be an appropriate strategy for international expansion, and want to utilize Dutch student living abroad. We are going to create a Cheaque collection for those people, with English T-shirts. Those can become well-known through the Dutch students, or cities where a lot of Dutch expats live. For example, ‘Wänkr’ got some good reactions. We tried selling our products in Belgium for a while, but that didn’t really work. They go slightly crazy when you start explaining that you shouldn’t translate the text, but just pronounce it differently. We even though about creating design in Spanish, but we started facing problems because not everyone is familiar with the words because of the various dialects that are part of the language. However, the expansions abroad is in definitely in development. People laugh all over the world. Once our product is clicking internationally, things can evolve very quickly.’’

Do you have any good advice for young entrepreneurs or students?

‘’The most important thing you have to do, is act from your gut feeling. Whether you’re an emotional person or not: Your first gut feeling always tells you whether something is right or not. When we sit down as a team, and it feels right, we commit ourselves fully. It doesn’t matter how critical people will be: we are sure of ourselves. It can be very though as an entrepreneur to maintain that drive, especially because you don’t always have a visual result of your efforts. But to always keep going is the key to success.’’