Clearing customs

Hi there all you fans of The Fair Tailor.

We are currently moving forward towards the launch at a high pace. A luckey few have got the chance to design their own unique shirts at our beta site. Their respons has been very positive and helpful. We are now changing a few things after their tests and opinions.
The website looks great, the IT crew at Monator are doing a great job. I cant let you see the site yet, but you'll have to trust me.

When we launch the site we will have more products than tailor made shirts, we will also sell towels in ecological Egyptian cotton, cuff links made from recyckled circut boards and paper products made from in Nepal from recycled paper.

We are currently planning to move this blog, so that it will appear under our main website www.thefairtailor.com. But we will of course let you know all about that.

Right now the fabrics are clearing customs between India and Nepal. As soon as they get to Kathmandu we will start making the first shirts. Govinda, our employee in Nepal is doing a great job to get everything up to speed.

On Sunday you should try to get a hold of the newspaper Göteborgsposten. They interviewed me this Monday about social media. It's going to be interesting to read the article.

Sebastian Stjern

THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

A meeting with Björn Söderberg

After yesterdays tour of the fabric markets to look for fabrics for our fair trade tailor made shirts this has been a much calmer day. Saturday is the day of in Nepal so I thought it would be more quiet today. Little did I know that the neighbours have an orchestra and the orchestra had practice time a 6am today. I am glad that I can sleep fairly well despite of the noice.

Me using public transportation on the way to the fabric dealers

If the video doesn't work, use this link.

Today I have met with Björn Söderberg, a Swedish entrepreneur that is the reason that we have decided to put our production in Nepal. We had originally thought of having the production in Cambodja, but we started talking and here I am, 8 months later, in Kathmandu, Nepal.

We talked for hours about what can be done here in Nepal and why some things can not be done. It was interesting to get his insight to the situation in Nepal. He also had some really exciting projects planned for the future, but I can reveal here what he has planned. Today we discussed entrepreneurship, our business and Nepal. On Friday we are going out to see the Watabaran paper production facilities.

I have uploaded nine videos on YouTube now, you can find them if you search for The Fair Tailor.

Sebastian Stjern

THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Cockroaches in the room and ants in the laptop

Yesterday I met with Tirtha and Poonam at the new office of Watabaran. It was great seeing them again and the new place looked great. They have changed offices to try to get many of ther projects located in the same area.

This is a video showing me and Tirhta going over some CVs and Poonam working by the computer.

During my visit Tirtha and I set up a busy schedule for my time here. I'm fully booked until Thursday so far, but I have a feeling that more things will turn up.

Video showing the outside of the new Watabaran office and the production house.

After the meeting with Tirtha and Poonam i found myself involved in a game of some kind with the locals. I don't know the name for it in English, but it is a little bit like pool.

I didn't get much sleep last night. I am a little, but not to much, jetlaged. But one thing that definitly kept me up was my bed company...

Big Bob, the king of my friendly room mate cockroaches

My first night here I was to tired to notice it, but the rooms was filled with cockroaches. I know that they'r not dangerous in any way, but I still don't like them. When I started my computer this morning I realized that I had some more friends. Suddenly there was an ant on my laptop keyboard. I flipped it away but soon there was another. And another, and another. I guess they moved in to my computer over night...

I have already called a new hostel, I'm moving after I have finished breakfast.

Sebastian Stjern

THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Hanging out in Abu Dhabi

I'm on my way to Kathmandu and right now I'm changing flights in Abu Dhabi. It's going to be fun to get back to Nepal again. It is the end of the monsoon season right now, so I suppose it will be a little rainy...

We are planing to conduct several interviews for our open position as quality inspector and I am also planning to meet with Björn Söderberg.

I'm a little tired right now, but this time I managed to get a few hours sleep on the flight from Frankfurt.

I just realised that they have a free wifi connection here - much better than the public computers.

I hope to be able to update the blog in Swedish - http://blogg.va.se/entreprenor as well before I leave here.

Sebastian Stjern

THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Our website is on it's way!

We have signed a deal with our website suppliers, Monator.

They will produce our soon-to-be-excellent website during the upcoming months. It is a big step for us and it means a huge financial commitment. But it also means that we are really on our way.

The applicants for the job in Nepal has started pouring in. Some of the applicants looks really exciting, I can't wait to get to Kathmandu to meet with them.

Lina did a great job in Stockholm last week. She made a lot of important contacts, both with interesting people that works with social entrepreneurship and with potential customers. I can really understand that she was exhausted when she came home on Friday evening.

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

We are hiring! Please let people know

We are planning to hire a quality controller in Kathmandu, Nepal and an ad will be posted in some local newspapers.

Please forward this ad to anyone you know who might know someone who might know someone in Nepal. Use Twitter, Facecbook, your blog, Reddit, Linkedin and any other way you can find to promote this.

Wanted a Quality Controller (QC) for textiles product based company

About The Company
The Fair Tailor is a company located in Gothenburg in Sweden. We sell Fair Trade and organic tailor made shirts and other textiles such as towels and pillowcases. We work together with the organisation Child Watabaran in Nepal, which gives all profit from its production house to social projects. Child Watabaran runs a school for street children, a child home and medical services for street children. We are convinced that it's possible to combine a successful business enterprise with social responsibility.

About the work
We are looking for someone who can work for us at the production house of Child Watabaran. You will be the link between The Fair Tailor and Child Watabaran. You will be in charge of quality inspections and you make sure that everything is up to our quality standard. You will also help us keep track on stock levels and shipping statuses.

Desired Qualities of Quality Controller
Honesty is an absolute requirement for us and besides, you have:

· At least 5 years of experience working as Quality Controller in exclusive tailoring and export based garment and a knowledge and understanding of the quality expected by our European customers.

· Knowledge of quality related to fabric types, accessories, production process and process of quality check

· Excellent command of both written and spoken English and Nepali.
Computer proficiency in several Windows-based applications, such as Word Processing, Internet browser as well as experience of using a digital camera.Excellent knowledge of using internet and computer savvy people gets priority.

· The ability to work independently and as part of a team and that you can perform under pressure.

Women and candidates from underprivileged castes and ethnic groups are highly encouraged to apply. Interested candidates are solicited to send their complete application with CV, two referees and a recent passport size photograph.

Only short-listed candidates will be called for interview.

Apply before August 29 2009 with CV, name and address of two referees, recent photo and expected salary.
Send your application to info@thefairtailor.com and tirtha@watabaran.com

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

Tailor made Fair Trade and ecological fine dress shirts via Internet

Fair Trade

After having spent the weekend at the parents in law in Värmland I am now ready to take on a new week with The Fair Tailor.

Last week I attended a coaching session with an accountant and he made a quick overlook of our budget and found some things that we should have wrote differently. There is no doubt that we need help from someone who knows more about business economics than we do. The coaching session was arranged by Göteborgs Nyföretagarcentrum and if you live in this region and are planning to start a business, I can really recommend going there.

When I was in Nepal in April I med with a group of Swedish students who were there to study Fair Trade. We met in Patan, just south of Kathmandu, to share our experiences of Nepal. Now they are back and one of them was interview by a local paper, NWT. You can read the whole article here link

By chance I came across an only newspaper article in Dagens Industri about Björn Söderberg who has helped us to get in touch with people in Nepal. The article is nothing extraordinary, it tells the story Björn has told tons of newspapers and magazines, but what struck me was the comments to the article. Many of them were really mean and ill-natured and I suppose it is easy to come across some people like that with an article in a business newspaper. In my blog at Veckans Affärer I have already came across comments about our Fair Trade focus. I know a lot of people don't understand the point of Fair Trade, I suppose I will have to get used to facing them more often... You can read the article about Björn and the comments here: link

Sebastian Stjern
THE FAIR TAILOR
-Dress Responsibly

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...

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.

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.