First, a quick introduction:
No Nasties is an ethical clothing brand. We want Indian consumers to support Indian farmers, and to buy more organic fairtrade cotton clothes to help stop the spate of farmer suicides in the country (one every half hour – it’s shocking!). We want to make fantastic products in a sustainable and eco-friendly way. Win for the consumer & the brand, win for the planet and big win for the farmers.
I’m sharing some thoughts of our 3 year journey and also about our upcoming plans (for which we could use some support from you).
The Highs:
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- Being India’s first company committed to organic & fairtrade clothes meant we got a lot of attention, a lot of press. Feels good to be acknowledged for our passion & purpose.
- People love our products and want more. Alok’s words when he got his first No Nasties t-shirt: “You’ve got it!”.
- I love what we do! The company is a close reflection of my personal values and that’s a great feeling.
The Lessons:
- Building a brand that people LOVE is essential. Gain trust through our transparency, gain respect through our purpose, gain fans through our products. It’s a 24×7 job too!
- Supply chain in the garment industry in India is a pain. We’ve lost millions because of factory delays & quality issues. Need to have multiple vendors.
- The t-shirt business is all about inventory management and cash flow. Competition is always at your heels and margins keep shrinking. It’s tough.
What’s going on with No Nasties now?
We’ve had a tough year. It started with lots of promise – we had a great sales pipeline and had switched production to a huge, cutting edge factory. But the factory quality was not at par with our standards and we rejected 2 entire collections and lost most of our large clients too. It sucked. We were almost out of cash and needed me to put in a lot of personal funds to keep going.
But it also gave us time to reflect on what we really want to do as a brand – which is be more consumer facing and more about the ethical, sustainable movement. Not be just a t-shirt vendor for other brands but actually make clothes we love ourselves. Expand from t-shirts to a bigger clothing line – because that’s what our customers were asking for and because it’s what we always wanted to do too.
So here it is. The new No Nasties.
Dresses, polos, tank tops, tees & a lot more coming soon.
This is a big (& expensive) leap for us and we need to make sure this is a huge hit. We’re crowd-funding our way to success and have launched our “Give us a Kick” campaign for it. But it’s a different kind of crowd-funding campaign – instead of asking for donations, we are asking for commitments to buy our products, by way of gift-cards. And these gift-cards are valid for life; they don’t have a “valid till” date 🙂
Take a look at our campaign and tell me what you think: It runs only till Sept. 30th. Give us a Kick!
And if you like it, do support us + spread the word too!
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UPDATE
Nov 7th, 2014
What a Kick!
The response to our crowd-funding campaign was great and successful! Thank you!
We raised enough money to kick off this collection and have since re-launched our website with a brand new design. Take a look – www.nonasties.in – and let us know what you think!
Some learnings from the crowd-funding exercise:
1. What worked for us in the campaign the most was reaching out to individuals directly and re-engaging our customers who hadn’t heard from us in a while. Personal, honest emails always solicited a warm response and support for the brand.
2. Posting on community forums (like this), blogs, and social media is helpful in creating a “surround-sound”, multiple loudspeakers kind of buzz, as opposed to a single large push on a single medium. I think we got the most volume of visitors from these forums.
3. Key Influencers made all the difference. About 40% of our funding came from a handful of key individuals either directly from their purchase of our gift cards or through their friends & family (thanks, Asha!).
I’m happy to share more details about our campaign if you’re interested. You can write me here or directly at apurva@nonasties.in.
Thanks once again – love being part of this community!
/Apurva
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