Mission, Supply Chain, and a Story

Taz and I spent the last few days wrestling with our supply chain. To achieve our social mission, our supply chain needs to meet a very stringent set of requirements. The artisans or workers need to be women working for more than fair wages (though still need to determine exactly what that means) under excellent working conditions. Our mission is to economically empower women. Our supply chain needs to ensure that we are doing just that. But just meeting our mission is not enough; we also need a story.

Though consistent work through well run factories can alleviate poverty (and some economists argue is more effective than microfinance), its story of poverty alleviation is less obvious (or perhaps less romantic) than increasing the demand of an artisan’s work. Working with factories changes our story. If we go that route, will our customers be compelled? Will our new story be simple enough to easily understand and spread? Is it truly mission-aligned?

As we work to define our supply-side model, we find ourselves wading into both development literature and marketing principles. All pieces in this business model puzzle need to fit.

Social Tech Time

Our Power of Social Technology class has convinced us of the merits of leveraging social tech as a means of communicating with people interested in our venture. We hope to use the following accounts to gather people's thoughts/insights/questions as we move from idea to company launch. Here are the details:

Facebook fan page: Our Unnamed Company
Twitter account: @unnamedcompany
Email address: theunnamedcompany@gmail.com

Please engage and help us by letting us know what you think! First topic for discussion... does anyone have ideas for a company name?

So, we decided to start a company

There's a contagious disease at the Stanford Graduate School of Business even more pernicious than an STD: entrepreneurship. It causes discomfort (especially in the second year, when many are participating in on-campus recruiting), and it's embarrassing to reveal to friends and family ("You've paid how much to get your MBA, and you're going to do what?!").

Though we may have caught the disease during our first year at the GSB, the symptoms began to show for Julia and me (Amber) over the summer between our first and second years. While working in cubicles on opposite ends of the country, we arrived at the same conclusion: post-graduation we wanted to start a company, and we wanted it to make a difference in people's lives. When we came back to campus in September, we sheepishly revealed our summer revelations to one another. Scared and excited, we decided to move ahead.

Over the next couple of months we met with classmate after classmate, sharing our vague ideas and brainstorming with them. Finally, we settled on an idea: we would source luxury crafts made by female artisans in developing countries and sell them to women in the US. We would send the proceeds back to the artists, to help them scale their businesses, send their children to school, and increase their quality of life.

Our idea was far from finalized, but it was established enough for us to start recruiting a team. We had our eyes on three classmates in particular, each with expertise in a different area that would be integral to our business. We started courting them.

Fast forward to the present, and we are a team of five second-year MBA women committed to starting a company. Our focus has narrowed, and we are now looking at home furnishings in particular rather than artisan crafts more broadly. The overall plan is still the same though: source high quality, unique goods from female artists in developing countries, and sell to women with disposable incomes in the US.

This blog will detail our trials and tribulations as we get our company off the ground. This is the true story of the evoluation of our currently unnamed company.