Almost finished!

I've spent a large portion of the weekend working on my old friend, the business plan.

The work has come along nicely and I'm almost finished, I just have to re-work the summary and the risk analysis tomorrow. Then we will be ready to apply for a loan from ALMI.

When I worked at Saab and Volvo I used to get the weekends off AND get payed. Those were the days ;) No, to be honest I like what I'm doing now much more. I'm happy about the change of careers. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meeting with Björn

Long before we had even thought about starting this company Lina read a book by Björn Söderberg and got inspired by his entrepreneurship in Nepal. In the book Björn told the story about how he came to Nepal after high school and how that lead to that he now has started several CSR companies there.

Last fall we went to a lecture he held and it got us both inspired. When we some time later realised that he might want to work with us in the future we decided that we wanted to start the company in Nepal.

So, today we had our first meeting with Björn. Since he lives in Nepal he has very a busy schedule when he is in Sweden. Luckily he had time to meet us today, on a Sunday. Since I’m going to Nepal the day after tomorrow I felt that it would be good to get some tips before going.
We sat down together for one and a half hour to discuss what we want to do, what he has done in Nepal, how we can put our plans in to action.

Björn gave me some good leads to follow up on when I go to Nepal. One of the persons I’m looking forward the most to meeting when I’m there is his old friend Tirtha, the person who runs Child Watabaran Center.

Now I need to prepare, we are meeting with Iqube tomorrow and we need to have a good presentation of both The Fair Tailor and us to show them.

Who are you?

Yesterday we discussed our business idea with Elin and Mikael (see yesterdays post) and I must say that they were really good at playing the devil’s advocate. They really put us to the test, they questioned our decisions and forced us to motivate why we had made the choices we had made. Once we had finished crying ;) we had valuable new input. We talked a lot about whom we will be as a company and who we are going to sell our products to. So if you are considering to buy our products; who are you?

Today we are meeting with Björn Söderberg, a Swedish entrepreneur who has started several CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) companies in Nepal.

By the way, did you remember to turn off your lights during Earth Hour yesterday?

Starting a LOHAS company

My name is Sebastian Stjern and together with my wife, Lina, I’m starting a LOHAS company. LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability and what we basically want to do is to save the world, one person at the time. As many agree we need to change certain things in the way we go about with our daily lives.
We want to give our customers a chance to make a difference with their actions as well as offer a product that is as good as or better than what you can get from other companies.

So it all boils down to the big question: What is it that we are going to do?

We are planning to start an online tailor shop which employs persons who are unlikely to be employed anywhere else, due to their past. We are planning to employ former prostitutes and street children who have little chance of making an honest living.
Our plan is not to give these persons aid in the traditional way, our goal is rather go give them a way of supporting themselves by getting a job.

This is what we want to do, and we want to do it in Nepal.

Why on earth have we decided on a small country in the Himalayans that, to be honest, most people couldn’t place on a map?
Well, we have several reasons.
1. We feel that we can make a difference in Nepal.
In Nepal the literacy rate is 29% among women and 49% over all. According to the CIA World Fact Book the GDP per capita in Nepal is $428 (rank 173 of 187 countries), in comparison The U.S. has $47,165 (100 times more), Sweden has $56,703 and the world leader in GDP, Liechtenstein has 145,734 (340 times more than Nepal).
2. We have managed to establish some important contacts in Nepal
3. Nepal has a long history of tailoring.
Today many Nepalese tailors are working abroad e.g. in Thailand, we want to keep this competence in the country, making it possible for persons to work in Nepal and not be forced to leave the country to make a living.

When we launch our site you will be able to order shirts made to your exact measurements, you will be able to choose among our ecological fabrics, what type of cuffs the shirt will have and much, much more.
Being 195cm (6’4 feet) tall I know first hand that it can be difficult to find a shirt that fits in many stores. So why not have one made that fits perfect to my measurements?

So is this just a blog to market a new site?
No, it’s not.
Of course, if the blog gets well liked more people will know about or company and thus, hopefully, we will succeed with our goals.
But that’s not all, we also want to:
1. Make you more aware about how your choices affect other people in the world.
2. Inform about the LOHAS concept.
3. Describe the day to day actions we take to launch the company.
4. Hopefully inspire someone else to start their own LOHAS company.

So if you find what I’m writing interesting, please continue reading this blog and tell your friends about it.