An inspiring environment

I must say that it is very inspiring to have an office in an company incubator and meet interesting entreprenours on a daily basis. There are currently a start up program with about 50 companies at IQube, the company incubator where our office is located, and there are maybe 20 more established companies here. Every single day I talk with someone whom either I get an idea from or that I give and idea or tip to. There are down sides as well of course. Everyone is very much in love with their own project and hence likes to talk about it. A lot. But generally that is not a big problem. Had we not been recommended by Trygghetsrådet to apply here we would probably still be sitting in our apartment.

Well, it's almost time for our meeting with our business coach, Christian Zanders from Jetshop. Before that I need to send an email to Tirtha in Nepal.

Sebastian Stjern

THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Catch 22

Today I’ve met with our business coach through IQube, Christian Zanders, the CEO of Jetshop.

Christian is there to push me and to give me good advice when I need to make tough decisions. We need to get our sales started and it is tough to get the time to make everything happen at once. I am currently investigating if it’s possible to employ someone to help with the sales part. Unfortunately we do not have much room in the budget to start paying salaries, but to make The Fair Tailor profitable we need to sell. Do I smell a little catch 22?

Yesterday I meet with representatives from the regional government. They have room in their budget to support projects in companies that are growing, but I feel they might think we are a little to trade oriented for them to support us. Generally they to not support trade business. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Small steps forward

Today I've met with our business coach Christian Zanders from Jethsop.

Christian is a really good guy to work with and he has many good ideas. We met for three hours and I left the meeting with my head full of new thoughts about how we should do things.

I don't think we will pursuit ALMI until later in the project, so now we are trying to piece things together to see how we can set up our business without them. Right now I'm trying to set up a meeting with a representative from the regional government, they might be able to assist us.

People are answering the e-survey we've sent out. If you haven't received an invitation and you can read Swedish, please check out http://ow.ly/ak2Z

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

Fair Trade and business

Today we met Ingemar for lunch to discuss fair trade in general.

He had some interesting tips on what to consider and other companies that we could learn from. DEM collective is a company that everyone can learn from, but Ingemar, and his colleague Caroline, also mentioned some other companies that we hadn't heard about before, as for example White t-shirt.

Later today we had our first meeting with our business coach Christian Zanders from Jetshop. We sat down together for a couple of hours and both Lina and I feel that Christian knows a whole lot of things that can help us. Very promising! I am really exited about this.

The IQube business coach

Today we have two interesting meetings, first we're having lunch with Ingemar Gustafsson who manages a fair trade network, Nätverket för rättvis handel, and later we're meeting with our IQube business coach Christian Zanders.

Both Lina and I are quite new to fair trade so hopefully Ingemar can give us some advice on how to move on.

Christian runs an e-commerce solutions company, Jetshop, and he will be our business coach through our time here at IQube. I've googled him and he seems to have a lot of experience in fields that are important to us. It's great that we got this opportunity through IQube.