The story of Matt Scanlan, Diederik Rijsemus and cashmere apparel brand Naadam reads like an adventure novel.
During a globetrotting vacation in 2013, the two college friends found themselves stranded among Mongolian goat herders in the Gobi Desert for three weeks. They learned about the wool trade, and came away with a business idea: Make low-priced cashmere goods by purchasing wool directly from those herders, skipping the middlemen who bought low and sold to apparel brands at a high markup.
Neither co-founder had any industry experience or enough money to fund a startup. But in 2015, Scanlan’s parents put up their home as collateral for a $2.5 million loan from a private lender. Scanlan and Rijsemus transferred it to a Mongolian bank, withdrew all of it and drove the cash — stuffed into 32 plastic shopping bags, filling the back of an SUV — deep into the desert to buy Naadam’s first 50 tons of unprocessed cashmere wool.
In 2022, Naadam brought in $100 million in total revenue selling a wide range of cashmere products, from its top-selling $98 sweater to sweatpants and tank tops. (The business declined to share its 2023 sales numbers before the close of its current fiscal year.) It sells online, in stores like Saks 5th Avenue and in three of its own New York and Los Angeles brick-and-mortar locations.
Scanlan, the company’s CEO, is well aware how insane that sequence of events likely sounds. Given the inherent risk of a desert shopping spree with borrowed money and the fact that he’d never run a company before, he says “there were many moments” early on when he “had no idea how we were going to pay back that loan.”
Here’s how Naadam defied the odds.
‘A little bit of luck and opportunity’
First, Scanlan and Rijsemus obtained the wool. Then, they needed to figure out what to do with it.
They sent it to Beijing, where it was cleaned and scoured for impurities. From there, it went to Italy, where another third party spun it into yarn. The co-founders sold most of…
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