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Yann Rey

@yannrey

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founder of @tejoventures, a climate-focused, golden visa investment fund in portugal 🇵🇹 & maker of ice cream dreams🍦@lifeunframed

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Ten years. Most of it felt like an instant. Some of it felt like eternity. The highest highs, the lowest lows. Unframed shaped me, taught me, humbled me, nourished me.

I’m proud of what we’ve built and keep building. Ten years in, we’re still chasing what we set out to chase on day one. Never moved the goalposts. And, big bonus, I get to be the coolest dad in the world in the eyes of my four-year-old daughter.

This is us, taken a few days ago at our Kloof St store. Almost nobody in this photo was here at the beginning. Unframed isn’t something we built once and held onto. It gets carried by whoever is holding it now, and it has been handed on many times.

So this final post in our 10th-anniversary series is a thank you, to everyone who has had a hand in this, in whatever shape or form.

Our team, past and present. Excellence isn’t something you reach, it’s something you show up for every day, and you did. Thank you.
Our partner stores and food service clients, for trusting us to deliver on the experience you work so hard to bring your own customers.
And to you. Our customers.
The supporters from the early days.
The fanatics who show up on cold, wet winter nights.
The date nights. The family outings.
The ones who taste every flavour in the display and still can’t pick.
The ones who choose with conviction and can’t be distracted.
The daring ones, first to try whatever we come up with.
The steady ones, loyal to one beloved flavour for years.
The make-up ice cream dates. The make-out ice cream dates.
The cosy ones ordering in from the couch.
The ones kind enough to leave us amazing reviews.
The ones who left us bad reviews and helped us get better when we fell short.
And all the ones I’m forgetting.

Well past one million scoops served.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Cheers to the last ten years, and the next ten to come.
With gratitude and guilty frozen pleasure,

Yann by @yannrey

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Ten years in, one of the clearest things I’ve learned is that you can design the space, formulate the flavour, get the texture exactly where you want it, but none of it survives contact with a customer if the person on the other side doesn’t care. Aiming for excellence means aiming to make every single touchpoint in our company excellent. And this applies at every level of the company.

Through the years we’ve had more excellent people than I could mention in a single post.

“We’re in the business of delivering happiness, so we’re looking for someone that is quick to smile, easy to laugh, not easily offended, and open to the entrepreneurial hustle of growing a business.” This is the intro paragraph you can read on every job description we put out, and overall we got what asked for. And, obviously, we come with a slightly unreasonable obsession with ice cream and dessert in general.

This is a shoutout to our beloved team who makes our world turn round, and come to work every single day with the ambition to leave you better than they found you. by @yannrey

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Our little Rey family has something special to share… 🤭 Swipe left!

Romy is getting a baby brother !! — just in time for Christmas. 🎄💙

The journey to get here has been an emotional rollercoaster, and one I’ll share more about in the coming months. But for now, I just want to celebrate this moment. ✨

We are so incredibly grateful to the friends and family who supported us along the way, to the best coach @fertility.with.jaya for working her magic, and to @sarahannestewart for making that introduction in the first place. Also shoutout to the @myshapods community and the mamas who stood by & responded to so many late night texts. It has taken a village already, and we feel so, so lucky.

💙👶

📸 by Daddy @YannRey taken in Costa De Caparica, Setubal, Portugal by @yannrey

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Undoubtedly one of the most painful times in the business. We all hold scars from that time, in some shape or form.

I got stuck in the US when the world shut down. It became about survival. The company, in many ways, was a safety net for our employees. We had to make it work.

Then, just as we thought we’d get a full summer season, a new strain would show up in December, right at the start of our high season, and the travel bans would follow. The narrative was that South Africa was where every new variant came from. The season written off, twice.

Our customers showed up, some suppliers supported us, others less so, but in the end we made it through. Three full years of standstill, but alive.

Then, as we thought we’re finally out of it, the V&A Food Market begins a ten-month build-out into what would become the Time Out Market.

Another year. More pain. It felt like it would never end, but it did. Naturally. Growing resilience through pain. Graduating from our teenage years into adulthood as a business.

#founderstory #lifeunframed #covidthrowback by @yannrey

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After opening our second store, we started thinking about how we could extend our reach a little further across the Western Cape. Through conversations and tinkering, we landed on providing an ice cream cart format to our partners, something they could fold smoothly into their own operations and standards.

It actually started with a vintage Vespa and sidecar that we custom designed and retrofitted with a small display freezer. We outgrew it pretty quickly, and moved to a larger ice cream cart.

We’ve since built long-standing relationships with incredible landmark brands in the winelands: Delaire Graff, Spier, Boschendal. We feel incredibly proud to be working with the best of what hospitality in the Cape has to offer.

#growingbusiness #capetownicecream #partnerstores by @yannrey

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R&D week is arguably one of the most fun weeks of the year for us.

If you’re new here, Unframed is an artisanal dessert company in the true sense of the word. We produce pretty much everything we do from scratch, from raw ingredients. All of our flavours are uniquely formulated in-house, and one of the mottos of the business is to treat the classics really well, sometimes with a twist, and sometimes to go down a completely different path altogether and take our customers somewhere they haven’t been. Through the years we’ve expanded that into baked goods too, cookies and waffles.

So every year, for one week, we go back to our eight-year-old selves and dream up all the new flavours that get us excited. We’re talking dozens and dozens of tests. Taste, adjust, retest, taste again. Diet becomes exclusively ice cream for a full week.

The ultimate test: if you can’t stop eating it, it stays.

#artisinalicecream #buildingabrand #researchanddevelopment by @yannrey

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About a year after launch, we got the opportunity to join the V&A Food Market at the Waterfront as our second location. This build went much quicker. We were up and running in under a week.

We had amazing years at the V&A Food Market. Then Time Out came in for a much-needed revamp of the old building, and Unframed was confirmed as the only vendor to carry through into the new setting.

Time Out Market has brought an excellent standard of execution, and it’s been a great partnership since it opened, coming up on three years now. Really grateful to be working alongside some of the best local food talents

#founderstory #capetownbusiness #lifeunframed by @yannrey

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45C Kloof Street. Our first home.

Building our Kloof St store was my first go at designing a space and project managing a build, and to anyone who has tried, I’m sure you can relate. The setbacks felt like the world was ending, and the highs were seeing a vision come to life. Not for the faint of heart. I even remember crying one day after I thought the metal guys had messed up the structure, and I was running out of money. Turned out they were able to cut and re-weld… like metal allows you to do 😊

We made it through. The build took about two months longer than we’d planned, as it usually does, but in the end the world didn’t stop spinning and we survived.

The early days of Kloof were insane. Everything happened in 40 square metres: the production lab, the store, the finance department, the meeting room. It was everything and anything. People could see what was being made in the back, ice cream coming straight out of the turner into the display cabinet. The music was loud. The vibe of those summer nights was just amazing, people would dance in there. Some of my best memories are from those first years: being there with the team, getting stuck in, scooping and dishing out ice cream.

Ten years on, it’s still home.

#founderstory #buildingabusiness #capetowneats by @yannrey

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Hey, Yann here. I’m the founder of Unframed, and this month Unframed turns ten. To mark it, I’m taking over our account to tell the story in ten moments, in my own words. But first, let me introduce myself.

I grew up in Lyon, France, where food was always present. At home, around the industry, in kitchens, cleaning dishes. I was raised in that environment and I was comfortable in it, lucky to learn from great mentors, to grow up understanding taste, product, and cooking. During those years, I also built an ability to naturally connect with chefs and the people of this industry.

So when I felt the time had come to spread my own wings, I naturally turned to food and hospitality. I was starting a company in a country I had never been to, far from my roots in France, or New York, where I’d begun building a community. Looking back, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was driven by the notion that if I stayed true to the craft, left our customers better than we found them, with the discipline that investment banking had taught me, I would be stacking the odds in my favour.

The reality is that I was putting my entire life savings into it, and had to make it work. There was a sense of freedom in all of it. So I tried to focus on the task at hand, and not get too caught up in what could go wrong, which was plenty.

Ten years later, here we are. To celebrate, I’ll tell you the story in ten moments over the coming month. Follow along, it starts tomorrow with Day 0.

#startup #founderstory #lifeunframed by @yannrey

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Happy Father’s Day to @yannrey 🥐🫶🏻🩷🦒 - thank you for always cooking us the best food & for teaching our little girl to love food too. Thank you for always pushing us - whether that’s to hit the gym, the beach, or try new sports, when sometimes us girls just want to sit on the couch and watch a movie. ☺️ Thank you for giving the best kisses, cuddles, squeezy hugs, and genuinely making our family more loving everyday. 💓💓💓

They say that choosing the person you have kids with is the most important decision of your life. And after 12 years together and 7 years married and one perfect baby girl, I feel very confident we made the right choice, and very grateful with you by my side on this wild ride called life! 🎢🚀😘🥰💕❤️💜💗 #reysoflove taken in Lisbon, Portugal by @yannrey

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