Twitter, twitter little bird

If you like Twitter you can follow us there.
Lina handles The Fair Tailor Twitter on twitter.com/thefairtailor

More media coverage

This morning Lina was interviewed by Radio Prime, a local radio station.
It was live and it was quite a long interview, I think they talked for ten minutes.
The radio station has not published Lina's interview on their website yet, but you can listen to the interview they did with Jonas Almeling from Venture Cup http://ftp.radioprime.no/VENTURE CUP.mp3

We were also featured in a local newspaper yesterday, Värmlands Folkblad wrote about us.

Unfortunately all the media coverage is in Swedish, but hopefully that will change in the future.

Today I've had a meeting with Arbetsförmedlingen (the unemployment agency).
To be frank, Arbetsförmedlingen doesn't have a good reputation but the impression I got today was great. I spoke with a man called Magnus and it was a really good meeting.

Tied for forth place

We didn't make it all the way, we had to settle for a tied fourth place.

I must say that we had a great night at the Venture Cup final, it was an excellent event and it was really, really exiting when they introduced the winners.
We had thought we had a fair chance to win the peoples price but we finished fourth there.
And we finished didn't make it to the national final either.

We are very happy and proud just to have been nominated and a fourth place in Venture Cup is no doubt a success for us.
We would like to congratulate the three winners from tonight and wish them luck in the national final.

Now it's time to sleep, Lina has a radio interview early tomorrow.

The big day

And so it's finally here - The big day.
Today is the day of the Venture Cup Final!

We took yesterday evening off and went out with some friends instead of sitting at home worrying about the final and I think that was a good decision. We managed to sleep last night and I only woke up nervous once =)

We believe that we have a fair chance of winning tonight, even though some of the other projects look impressive.
I'm happy about being top10, but I'm not content. If we would end up among the three winners it would be a really big break for us.

Wish us luck!

My netbook

Now it is finally here, my netbook, a Samsung NC10. It's white, it's small and it is really cool =)
I have also signed up for mobile 3G internet so from now on I will be on the move all the time.

I have attached a small picture from Bohusläningen, see my last post. It is tiny and low res, but it is Lina and me up in the corner.

I have also had a meeting with one of our potential web solution suppliers.
It was a good meeting, they know what they are talking about. The only downside with them is the price, but we might be able to work out a deal.

Life as a (local) celebrity

Yesterday I was interviewed by a local newspaper, Bohusläningen and today is the start of my new life as a local celebrity.
I have yet to discover all the perks and fringes associated with my newly won fame, but I did get a text message from my mother saying that she had read the article.

I spent a large part of last night trying to decide which netbook PC to buy. Since I will work both here and at IQube in the future, I need a fairly portable computer. I think I will go for a Samsung NC10, but the runner up, HP 2140, also looks good.

I am also trying to find organic fabrics, but that seems to be quite a challenge. If you buy from a producer the minimum quantity you need to buy is 1000kg/colour and quality. 1000kg makes a lot of shirts...

Media buzz

Last Friday Lina and I sent out a press release about the fact that we have made it in to the Venture Cup final.
Today we have been contacted by reporters from GP, VF, Bohuslänningen, NWT and Metro.
I'm not sure that they all will write something about us, but I like that they are interested in our work.

If you plan to send out press releases I can recommend Newsdesk.
If you can read Swedish you can find some of our press releases here:
1, 2, 3

Today I'm once again trying to catch up on things on my to do list...

Let's Twitter

Both Lina and I are now hooked on Twitter.
In my last post I wrote about the marketing seminar we went to on Friday. One of the things they talked s lot about was Twitter and we decided to put a little time in to learning what to do and what not to do.
Both of us already had Twitter accounts, but we are still trying to work out how it works, what to do and what not to do. I think we'll make a few rookie mistakes, but we have figured out that Twitter is not the same as the Facebook status...

Yesterday we took a day off from The Fair Tailor to play with friends, kids and Lego.

Marketing seminar

Today both Lina and I have spent the entire day in at a marketing seminar arranged by MIG.
The lectures was about social media and how to use it in your marketing. And it seems that I'm doing something right, they encouraged us to start writing blogs if we had not already done that.

Brit Stakston(JMW), Niclas Strandh(DigitalPR) and Peter Ingman(Newsdesk) held the most interesting lectures.
Brit and Niclas spoke mainly about social medias in general and what you should consider before starting working with social medias.
Peter is a profile in the Swedish marketing community, thus he wore a red jacket, red pants and red shoes. But his lecture was even more interesting than his clothes. This morning we actually posted our press release at his site Newsdesk, and I think that it might be a good platform for us in the future.

We are in the Venture Cup final!

Now it is finally official - We are in the Venture Cup final.
354 ideas have competed in this year's Venture Cup, now it is down to the final 10.
The big presentation we did on Tuesday (see earlier posts) was for Venture Cup. If we did a good enough job convincing the jury and they prefer our business plan over the others we will win on Wednesday.
Yesterday we spoke to one of the other nominees and they said that they had invested 2 500 000 SEK ($US 312 000) of their own money in their business idea.
You can read more about Venture Cup at their site.

We are the only CSR/LOHAS company in the final.

Working on a press release

We are currently working on a press release. We have some big news that is not yet official, so I'm not allowed to write here what has happened.
This is the first press release I have written so I'm not sure exactly what to write.
As soon as it is official the press release will be posted here. So, stay posted ;)

It's time to sum up the first day at IQube

First they presented the IQube way and what we could expect as an IQube company. Then they introduced the potential business coaches and there were some among them that we could really need help from.
After that it was time to listen to every ones business ideas and I'm really impressed. 27 ideas in a wide variety of fields. The youngest entrepreneurs were 18 and the oldest more than 40 years older. It was also inspiring to see the commitment and energy.

We did a short 5 min pitch of our idea and people seemed to like it. I completely forgot what I was supposed to say at one point, but I remained calm regardless of that. We have talked about the idea so many times now that I'm beginning to feel really comfortable doing it.

One more thing: Don't forget about Earth Day. Check out my old friend Wikipedia for more info.

The first day at IQube

Yesterday afternoon we had a coaching session with Andreas at Drivhuset.
It's always good to talk to him. He thinks we are doing a good job, but he has always these little tips on how we can make things a little bit smarter.

After the meeting we went to a lecture about the art of selling.
Ulla-Lisa Thordén told us about selling from an interesting perspective. She is a veteran in the business and she thinks of selling as something everyone can do, it's just about to find the right product to sell, i.e. something you believe in.

Now we have to run, we have our first day at IQube, the company incubator I have written about earlier.

When all is said and done

We did it!
We held the presentation today and I must say that we did a damn good job.
I had thought that I should be more nervous than what was the case, but it felt good. We knew what we were talking about!
Lina was excellent, she is very professional when it comes to these sorts of things.

I think we managed to say what we wanted to say and we were able to answer the questions we got fairly well. The time for questions was only 6 minutes, we would actually have liked to receive more questions.
And now we wait. It will be very interesting to see the outcome of all this.

Nerves

In about 1,5h Lina and I will make a very important presentation, maybe the most important so far.
So for obvious reasons we are both quite nervous now. I do actually think we will do fine. We know what we are going to talk about, we have after all worked on this business for 4,5 months now.
It's going to be interesting to see what kind of questions we will get afterwards.
Now it's time to do the final preparations.
Wish us luck!

I like deadlines

Today at 1pm is the deadline for the presentation we will make tomorrow and we are of course not completely finished yet. It is after all 3h30 left until the deadline. But now it's just cosmetics left.

Today we are having some of Lina's class mates over for a trial run at the final presentation. We will give them lasagna and they will give us feedback on our presentation. That sounds like a great deal to me =)

For some strange reason I really like the feeling of a deadline approaching, at least if I feel that I have a reasonably good chance of making it. I like the adrenalin it gives me.

Working on the budget

What better is there to do on a Sunday evening than to work on a budget?
We realized this evening that we had to update the budget and that our deadline was at 1pm tomorrow. We knew about the deadline, but we had hoped that we did not have to update the budget. But today, for some reason, we changed our minds =)
Since Lina has to work at Universeum tomorrow it was either tonight or never, and we choose now.

I feel that I'm to tired too be writing here, so I think I'll go to bed now.

How to market this blog

In my last post I wrote that it was strange that not everybody worked seven days a week.
Yesterday (a Saturday) I emailed some of the web designers that we are talking to about making our website, and I actually got emails back from two of them within a few hours. On a beautiful sunny spring Saturday.

I don't think I will work a full day today, but I need to put in a few hours. One thing I'm not looking forward to is to sort out all the receipts from my trip to Nepal...

I will also try to get more people to read this blog. Do you have any suggestions on how to market it, please let me know.

The search for a web designer

We are discussing with several web designers about the creation of our website. Since I've been out traveling for most of the last two months those discussion has almost came to a stand still. Now it's time to do something about it again!

I've sent out some emails today, but I suppose I'll have to wait until Monday to get any answers. I don't understand that people actually don't work 7 days a week.
OK, five months ago I just wanted the working day to end, I looked at the watch every five minutes to see if it was time to go home yet. But now it's different, I really like what I do and I don't mind working when I have the time to do so, even if it means staying inside on a beautiful spring Saturday.
And besides, I have been out a little while today, so it's not all bad =)

Our private presentation coaching session

Yesterday we were at the private presentation coaching session I wrote about earlier. We've worked a lot on our presentation but time was so short that I did not have time to really prepare what I should say. We had divided the different slides of the presentation between us and I knew roughly what I was supposed to talk about. But despite of that it worked great. Since I have put a lot of time and effort into the business plan I actually knew what I was talking about.

Lina is an excellent public speaker, she has even held some lectures about entrepreneurship at the University, so I wasn't worried about her performance.
And of course she aced it!

We got very positive feedback, the people there really liked what we had do say. And the way we said it.

Today I will try to take care of some of the things on my massive to-do-list. Hopefully it will be shorter by nightfall.

Working on a presentation

Tomorrow we have a private coaching session where we will be given feedback on our company presentation.
I am currently trying to find a way to show that companies can be profit making without being profit maximising. I am sure it is possible to be it, but I am a little afraid that some people will think that it's impossible. That you either have to be a NGO or a company. Either helping people or making as much money as possible.

.ppt

The trip home to Sweden was quite tiresome, but I did manage to sleep two hours on the flight between Abu Dhabi and Munich.

Today Lina and I have been to a lecture about how to make presentations. Maria from PresentationSupport was there and told us a lot about what to do and what not to do. Not surprising it was a very good lecture =)
We will meet with her again on Friday to get have a private coaching session where she will give us feedback on our presentation material.
Most of today and tomorrow will be spent on updating our presentation material so we are prepared for the meeting with Maria.

A tragic Nepali story

Just before I was heading of to the airport I read some tragic news.
A dutch man who has run an orphanage here in Kathmandu has been found guilty of molesting two of the children under his care.
During my time here in Kathmandu I have met so many people who are working really hard to help struggling Nepali people and then I hear about something like this. It just makes me sad.
The man was sentenced to nine years in prison.

You can read more about it in some Swedish news papers.
Aftonbladet
GP

The last day of business in Kathmandu

Yesterday morning I met with Kumbeshwar Technical School (KTS) in Patan. It is an organization that works with the lowest of the lowest casts, people who are considered untouchable.
When they started the organization in 1983 they found that 90% of the members of the lowest casts did not even have names. No one could read. Some orphanages would not even accept orphans from the lowest casts.
The situation is still terrible for most of them, specially on the country side. But organizations like KTS are making a real difference.
The organization has 479 people in its programs and I was very impressed with what they showed me. Since 1994 the organization has been self reliant, so they don't need any external money other than what they make by selling crafts they have produced.
I visited their school and it really made my heart melt to see the children. They were all so cute and so happy to be in school, without KTS they would probably have to turn to the streets...

Yesterday I was contacted by a Swedish man called Claes who works an organization called Namaste Nepal. They have a training program to teach women tailoring and he has a program with 70 women in the south of the country.
He knows both Tirtha and Björn well, so we will be in contact again when I get to Sweden. Maybe we can work together.
Björn is by the way quite ill, Tirtha told me last night that he has some sort of typhoid and that he is in the hospital.

Last night I was invited to Tirhta and Poonam for dinner. It was really nice to see their home and learn more about the way of the country.
I'm looking forward to get The Fair Tailor up and running so that we can start working together for real.

By the way, a taxi driver told me that the road between Pokhara and Kathmandu would not open until 6pm yesterday. That means that maybe the biggest road in the country stayed closed for more than 30h. It seems I was lucky to get through to Kathmandu.

I have a long trip ahead of me, I suppose that it is about 40 hours until I will be back in my own bed...

Nepalese traffic

The plan for today was to take the bus from Pokhara to Kathmandu and then have a look around Kathmandu. I had thought about flying but from an environmental point of view it is of course better to take the bus. The bus was supposed to take 7 hours, it took 12. There had been an accident 50km from Kathmandu, two trucks had collided and turned over. The road between Pokhara and Kathmandu is the biggest in the country (still not very big) and it was completely shut of. After waiting 30 minutes I decided to start walking to get past the accident. It took me almost two hours to go 10km with 30kg of luggage, 20 on my back and 10 in a cabin bag on wheels. I found a bus that was going to Kathmandu and after about an hour of waiting it started moving towards the city. It went for 50 meters, then stopped. It went for 50 meters, then stopped. It went for 20 meters, then stopped. It went for 100 meters, then stopped. It took us 1,5h to go the 30km to Kathmandu. So right now I am rather tired...

Tomorrow I'm meeting with a NGO that are working to help people from the lowest casts in the morning and in the evening I'm having dinner with Tirtha and his wife.

A day off

Today I have taken a break from The Fair Tailor.
I'm in Pokhara and today I went paragliding overlooking the Himalayas - Simply amazing!
Tomorrow I will go back to Kathmandu.
They have a local election here today and I think it's the start of the Nepali new year, but I think the bus will go tomorrow.

Today, on the way to the start site for the paragliding, I talked to an English woman who have been teaching at a village school for a month. She said that there were hardly any men in the village, they were all abroad working. Even though the women have to take care of the family they have hardly any rights. It us usually someone in the husbands family who is in charge.
When I came here on the bus yesterday I sat next to a man from the area, he had been away working for 20 months in Dubai. He got married three years ago and he had not seen his wife for 20 months, that is tough. And real life for a lot of people in this country.
His wife had stayed in Nepal to take care of his parents...

We made IQube!

I'm in Pokhara, I got here by bus. It "only" took eight hours on a very bumpy road.
The Swedish Fair Trade students I wrote about earlier are here as well and they sent me an text yesterday saying that all the bumping around coming here made them an inch shorter. I do believe them.

But now to the big thing.
We made IQube!!!

We got an email from them today saying that they had 200 ideas presented to them, they then met with 80 of the entrepreneurs and finally selected 30 of them.
So, this means a lot of things, for one we will get an office, a business coach and business training. We will also get access to the network of more than 200 companies connected to IQube today.
So what I am trying to say is that it is a big deal.

IQube doesn't only consider the business idea, they put a lot of importance in who the entrepreneurs are. And we made it.
Feels kinda good :)

The Consule General

This morning I have met with the Swedish Consul General here in Nepal.
Finding places here in Nepal is not always easy, often the address you are given is just the part of the city where the place is located.
Luckily people here are friendly and several persons have drawn maps in my notebook. The taxi dropped me of 20 minutes before the meeting and luckily it only took me 20 minutes to find the Consulate :)
The Consul and I talked for about an hour about what to think of when doing business in Nepal, the political situation and the power shortage.
The Consul's brother had actually lived in Sweden and worked at Volvo.

The political situation here is fragile and all political parties are working together to create a new constitution that should be finished within one year.
The Maoist government who runs the country now was actually elected, and the consul pointed out that the king left his throne without any violence.

It will be interesting to see how the country develops over the coming years. Hopefully Lina and I will be working with Nepal for many years to come.

My plan for the next couple of days is to work on ways to market this blog and The Fair Tailor.
I will also leave Kathmandu for a few days to see a little more about the country and learn more about the Nepalese way.

Organic cotton

Today has been a good day, I started of by meeting some interesting people together with Tirtha.
First we went to the Garment Producers Association. They gave us contact information to a lot of fabric producers and fabric importers. Tirtha will try and get in contact with most of them over the next couple days.
One of the persons the Garment Producers Association told us about sounded so interesting that we decided to go straight to his production facility. He is maybe the only importer of organic cotton to Nepal and he uses it to make fabrics. That means that it is possible to get a hold of organic cotton fabrics in Nepal. Now we just need to make sure the quality is good enough. I'm not sure that we can get the best quality fabric if we want to use ecological cotton, but we are thinking of having organic fabric as one of the options. It was good to at least see that organic fabrics are available, and maybe possible to produce in better quality.

After the meetings with Tirtha I met with WebSearch Pro, an website producer runt by Bjorn Soderberg. Websearch is one of the companies we are discussing with to make our website. It was interesting to see their facilities.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with the Consul General of Sweden to get their point of view on the political situation here in Nepal and maybe some tips on what to think of when doing business here.

Fair Trade in Nepal

Today is an official strike day here in Nepal. It is kind of their labour day so there is for example hardly any public transportation or taxis. Some of the persons working at Watabaran had not been able to get to work today because of the strike.

Today I started of by going to Patan, just south of Kathmandu. First I met with the Fair Trade Group Nepal and they told me a little about fair trade here in general, but unfortunately they didn't have as much information that I had hoped.
After having met them I went to two nearby Fair Trade shops. It was interesting to see everything that had been produced under fair conditions, and also to compare the price tags there with the price tags in the tourist district. All the shops in the tourist district claim to be fair, ecological and so on but that is simply not true. So the price is of course much higher in the Fair Trade shops...

After the visits in Patan I went to the Watabaran production facilities and met with Tirtha and the production supervisor. They gave me an estimate on the cost to produce shirts here in Nepal and we discussed what we can do. It seems impossible to get a hold of organic cotton fabrics here in Nepal, bu we have still not given up on finding some.
Tomorrow we are going together to a fabric dealer here in Kathmandu, we'll see how that goes.

A slow day in Kathmandu

Today has been a rather slow day here in Kathmandu. The pollutions combined with a cold I've caught makes me feel a bit ill.

I spoke to Tirtha earlier and he is working on setting up meetings with fabric supplier. It seems difficult to find organically grown cotton fabrics here in Nepal, but he's working on it.

I have set up a meeting for tomorrow with Fair Trade Group Nepal to learn more about how Fair Trade is done here. On Tuesday I'm meeting with WebSearch, the internet company Bjorn Soderberg has started here in Nepal.

Fair Trade students

Tonight I met with a group of Swedish Fair Trade students who are in Nepal to see how fair trade and fair production works in real life.
We talked for four hours and they gave me a lot of good information, including the name of some people I should meet when I'm here in Nepal. They had actually met with Watabaran here in Nepal and with Bjorn Soderbergs mother back in Sweden.

One thing we discussed was Ekobanken, a social banking bank. We will definitely try to meet with them when I get back to Sweden.
Ekobanken helped to finance a company called DEM collective, a Swedish fare trade company. What DEM has done is really impressive and we hope to learn a lot by studying what they have done.

Tomorrow I'm changing hostels, I'm moving to an are north of the tourist area. Hopefully it will be a bit more quite there.
Right now there is a guy playing trombone just outside my hostel, it is 11pm and tomorrow is a work day here... I've been to almost 40 countries but I think this is the loudest one =)

I spend a lot of time here in Nepal thinking

Before I went with Tirtha to Watabaran I had seen children on the streets here in the tourist district of Thamel, but I had actually not really considered that they are actually the street children of Kathmandu.
Last night I had no problem identifying them. They are so young and so small. They run around and collect plastic that they might be able to sell. The use glue to get high. They are very likely to have a short and rough life. And they are one of the reasons that I'm here in Kathmandu today.
Lina and I want to be a part of the network that are giving the street children a chance. A possibility to not be saved, but to save themselves.

I also think a lot about what we need to do to start up The Fair Tailor. There are a lot of things we need to figure out, a lot of paths we might take. It is a very interesting journey and I am glad that I have the opportunity to do what I'm doing.

I am also happy to see that so many persons wants to read our blog and see what we are up to. So far people from 15 countries have read it and last week we had 178 unique visitors.
But we need all the publicity we can get, so tell all your friends about us.
If we can show that there are a lot of people who are interested in what we do it will make it easier for us to e.g. convince the bank that we have an excellent business idea and that they should loan us a big bag of money so that we can make The Fair Tailor happen.

Aid through trade

Today has been a very interesting day.
I woke up at 3:30 local time after having slept for 3h30 and I could not go back to sleep. But at least it gave me a chance to see the city wake up.

Before lunch I took a taxi to meet up with Tirtha.
He took me to the Watabaran production. It is a quite small facility where the workers produce clothes and bags.
We discussed how Watabaran works and how we could work together. After a couple of hours there we went to the boys home. The Swedish company Xdin sponsors the boys home, where both the boys and the girls go to school. Every month Xdin sends money. By western standards it is not a huge amount, but it is enough to provide 16 boys who used to live on the street with housing, food, school, clothes, yes basically everything. It is hard do understand why not other companies does the same.
Tirtha told me about the history of Watabaran and how they have experimented to come up with the concept that they currently have. Tirtha told me about when he came across a boy who lived on the streets who had a bleeding wound on his hand. The boy tried to stop the blood flow by putting soil in the wound. That made Tirtha and Bjorn start an ambulance service where medical doctors seek up street children to provide them with health care.

After the visit at the boys home we went to the girls home. Everybody was really friendly and I talked a little to the girls. Some of them were making paper airplanes of their old homework assignments and I showed them my special paper airplane design and they were very impressed =)

It was good to see how the children live and how Watabaran makes life easier for them.

Our initial idea was to train our personnel ourselves but that does not seem possible. It takes years to make learn to make a shirt so we are thinking of a different method. Side by side of the general production we think about having children from the school studying how the professional tailors make shirts, thus learning the work faster and better so that they later can join the general production.
But there are still tons of details to sort out.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with a group of Swedish student who are here to study Fair Trade, it is going to be interesting to get their opinion on The Fair Tailor project.

By the way, "Aid through trade" is a slogan Watabaran uses. I like it.

First day in Kathmandu

This will be a short post, It's almost 8pm and I think the power will go out at 8pm, that is at least what happened yesterday.

After having slept for 13 hours I started of slowly today.
I have managed to get in contact with a group of Swedes traveling to Nepal to study Fair Trade and I hope to be able to meet with them on Saturday.

Today I have been walking around the city, trying to get a feel for it. It's loud, a bit dirty and crowded. And so far I like it =)
I got me a Nepalese sim card, so now it is easier for people to get in contact with me here. I actually had to leave my finger prints to get the sim card.

Tomorrow I'm meeting Tirtha again, I think we will go to Child Watabaran center together.

Back in Sweden I am a member of Mentor Sverige, an organization similar to the Big Brother program in the US. Anyway, in their news mail today Glenn, the project manager for Mentor in Gothenburg included some info about The Fair Tailor. I imagine that alot of the people that are members of Mentor are LOHAS so that is good PR for us.
Check out the Mentor website if you are interested in what they do.

Our first major setback

I just got of the phone with ALMI, a governmental organization that can assist companies with loans.
They take a higher interest rate than banks, but on the other hand you don't have to have the same type of security for the loan.
The setback is that they won't give us a loan, and if they won't give us a loan it will be much more difficult to finance our company. Far from impossible, but without doubt more difficult. Up until now everything feels like it has gone our way, so I suppose a setback was unavoidable.

Right now it doesn't feel to good, but I am convinced that we will have many, many more setbacks before we are ready to launch our website :)
I hope to find answers to a lot of the questions ALMI had during my time here in Kathmandu.

And we still plan to win the Venture Cup, and once we have done that we won't need to take a loan from ALMI =)

Now I'll go out try to get a feel for the city of Kathmandu.

I'm in Nepal!

Right now I'm feeling rather tired, except for a 10 minutes power nap on the flight from Abu Dhabi I've been awake for 30.5h. But I don't feel to bad, but the plan is to go to my hostel an sleep after I've posted this.

Apart from the time it took the trip here was ok, nothing went really wrong.
From Gothenburg to the huge airport in Frankfurt to the chaotic airport in Abu Dhabi to the kind of slow airport here in Kathmandu.

Tirtha was kind enough to come and pick me up at the airport and then we went to my hostel. We discussed some issues, but quite frankly I was to tired to think straight. We decided to meet on Friday, then he is going to show me Child Watabaran Center.

I like the little of what I've seen of the city so far. Right now I'm staying in Thamel, the tourist district, but I plan to re-locate in a couple of days.