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.

Moving forward, and backward

Today I have felt some of the advantages of sitting at IQube, I meet people here that might have solutions to some of the problems we face. 

I have also spoken to Viveca Reimers at Västra Götalandsregionen, she is an environmental coordinator at their purchasing department. She was very helpful and took time to give me a few tips, but the conversation also made me realize that we have a long way to go before we can deal with such a large organization as Västra Götalandsregionen...

Today I have made some progress on the business plan, I have set a deadline to finish it this week.

A new era has begun

A new era has begun, we have moved The Fair Tailor from our apartment to IQube, a company incubator.

I think I will come here most days, Lina will also come by from time to time, she is still doing her internship at Universeum.

Today I have done a lot of things, but the business plan progress is slow. I don't know why, but I cant seem to get any flow in that work. And I need to finish it so that I can send it to the bank, to Arbetsförmedlingen, to ALMI, to...

To put it simple, it has to get finished.

But on the other hand there are quite a few things that has to get finished. I suppose the best way to solve it is to do everything at once...

Readers from all over the world

I think it's really neat to be able to see visitor stats from the blog.
The visitor number is growing constantly and I'm glad that so many persons find an interest in what is happening to The Fair Tailor.
Since I started writing in mid March people from 31 different countries have read the blog. I like that people from e.g. Qatar, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka and Japan are reading the blog.

A new newsletter - Sign up

I plan to spend a big portion of the day together with our business plan.

The plan we have now is good, but it was written over a month ago and it's a living document, it needs to be updated every now and then.

And even though the feedback from Venture Cup was very positive, there are some things we want to change based on their advice.

The Fair Tailor will start a newsletter where we will give a summary on what has happened lately.

If you want to start receiving the newsletter please send an email to sebastian(at)thefairtailor.com

Live interview with Lina

Now is the live interview with Lina available on the Radio Prime website.

You can listen to Lina here. (In Swedish)