Despite living in the fashion capital New York City during and after college, it was an eventful trip to the Gobi Desert that inspired Matt Scanlan and his co-founder Diederik Rijsemus to start an ethical cashmere apparel brand Naadam.
The pair had planned to travel around Asia, but through a series of miscommunications, they spent a month living with nomadic sheep herders in Mongolia. After returning to the U.S., they started Naadam to help their new friends sell their cashmere for a fairer price.
Matt explains that buying directly from the people caring for the goats means Naadam can guarantee that the herders — and their goats — are treated with respect, unlike other companies that don’t offer transparency over their supply chains.
And Naadam doesn’t just buy the cashmere. The company contributes to community projects that help the herders and their families — and, yes, their goats. For example, Naadam has helped to advance initiatives designed to stop desertification (the loss of grazing land), provide access to vets and build a play park.
Far from being self-righteous, Matt is self-deprecating and funny, which is how he wants Naadam to feel. “I assume everybody else in the room is smarter than me, and that's who we want to be as a brand. I think people subconsciously identify with that. … We don't think we're better than anybody else. We think we're equal with everybody else.”
Featured Challenger👱♂️ Name: Matt Scanlan
⚙️ How he challenges: Matt is the co-founder and CEO of cashmere apparel brand Naadam, working directly with goat herders in Mongolia to purchase their cashmere at a fair price and on community projects.
🐐 Company: Naadam
💎 Noteworthy: It was while working at a venture capital firm on Wall Street that Matt decided he needed to see the world beyond the concrete jungle. “I hadn't really done much traveling: I was a pretty sheltered person. We were going to go to Beijing and Shanghai and Southeast Asia, and I was going to experiment with drugs,” he says. “I never got to.”
🔍 Where to find Matt: LinkedIn | Instagram
🔍 Where to find Naadam: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
Challenger Wisdom 💡 Finding unexpected similarities with different kinds of people“A lot of people don't stray far enough from home to recognize that there are similarities between them and people they think are different. In this crazy political climate, these truths are more relevant than they've ever been: If we seek to understand people that are ostensibly different, there's a lot of equality. That ideology and the value system that comes with that is ingrained in Naadam.”
💡 Focus on the why before what“We’ve struggled at times to figure out the how and the what of what it is we do, like what kind of sweaters we make and how much they cost. But what's never changed are the reasons why we do it. And for a brand, that is the most powerful thing in the world — really understanding, at your core, why you exist. We exist because we have a value system that we think other people will believe in.”
💡 To identify gaps and inefficiency, process information as outsiders“We didn't know what we were doing. It was this process of understanding all these pieces as outsiders, to really understand how to make it more efficient. We've definitely maintained that idea that we're outsiders. We’re always looking at what makes the most sense.”
💡 Go with the most ethical option“Everyone needs a v-neck and a crew neck, and everyone should have it in cashmere, and if you're going to do it in cashmere, make sure you get the most ethical option possible. There's a lot of stuff out there where the people who are manufacturing it don't know anything about where it came from.”
💡 The story sells the sweater“My gut instinct was to tell the story, stop trying to be what other people think your brand should be. If I just put a sweater in front of somebody, they don't understand. It's when I tell the story that this sweater becomes more valuable.”
💡 Help that’s actually helpful“We don't ever come in and give them more than they need or are asking for. We don't want to disrupt the ecosystem. If you go to any ecosystem and you give it more than it needs, it becomes reliant on the thing that you're giving. So we work within what the ecosystem can actually handle.”
💡 Know that entrepreneurial success doesn’t happen overnight“Building a business is really hard, and our success is an overnight success seven years in the making. The reality is it was a lot of hustling and hard work and some very scary moments. We were on the brink of failure for a long time and we made a ton of mistakes — and we still do. That's the entrepreneur's journey.”
Top quotes from the episode
Matt Scanlan:
Quote #1
“Brands should be like people: living things that are changing and evolving. They should have complexity and personality.”
Quote #2
“Very rarely does the first thing entrepreneurs ever do work so perfectly that it explodes overnight. It takes time to really identify product-market fit.”
Quote #3
“I love this brand. I can't imagine not doing what I get to do.”
Quote #4
“It’s obviously been very rewarding for me personally. When I was getting thrown out of my first boarding school at 16 years old, I never thought I'd be doing this for a living.”