Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was Nomad Lane started as an Etsy store?

Vanessa Jeswani: It was called something else. When we noticed that it was travel-related items that were kicking off, we rebranded it to Nomad Lane.

Sramana Mitra: This was 2016?

Kish Vasnani: This was 2015 when I was still working full-time and Vanessa had left Estee Lauder to explore e-commerce in different niches. It was around December of 2016 when we launched Nomad Lane. We were just tossing around different names. We had the idea for Nomad Lane. We quickly got on our phone to see if a domain was available. We were able to purchase it for $10 a year.

Sramana Mitra: What did you put on Nomad Lane when you started?

Vanessa Jeswani: Our first round of products were smaller accessories. We had passport wallets. We had some organizational cases for jewelry, cards, and wires. 

Kish Vasnani: It was primarily to hold a lot of the things we lost during our honeymoon. We started with the retail price point of $100 because we were bootstrapped. 

Sramana Mitra: Did you invest in inventory?

Kish Vasnani: Yes, we did. I think we invested around $5,000 in inventory.

Vanessa Jeswani: We had the first round of inventory shipped to our apartment in New York, completely overwhelming our living room.

Kish Vasnani: In the process of building our brand, Vanessa has more of a creative eye. We had built a beautifully designed site and were retailing for less than $100. We did all the standard market strategies. The reason we pivoted from accessories to bags was that we had a lot of feedback that they were expecting the price to be more than what we were charging. So we decided to go upmarket.

Sramana Mitra: When you started with that $5,000 inventory, where did the early customers come from?

Kish Vasnani: We built a prelaunch strategy. It was a referral program. We tried to drive word-of-mouth programs. We also focused a lot on emails. We did partnerships with brands. We used that email list on launch day. 

Sramana Mitra: Would you say email marketing was your primary customer acquisition strategy?

Vanessa Jeswani: Email marketing and the referral program.

Sramana Mitra: What were the highlights of 2017 to 2018?

Vanessa Jeswani: In 2017, we were just getting our feet wet. We were learning about different types of marketing channels that we could use in terms of email or referrals. We started dabbling in paid ads and working with influencers. We also got a lot of customer feedback. Our customers told us that our branding and products don’t match. That was a pivotal moment. Then in 2018, we started developing our first travel bag.

Sramana Mitra: Rewind a little bit. Tell me how you got the inventory for your private-label product manufactured.

Kish Vasnani: We got our domain in Decmeber of 2016. Then in Q1 and Q2 of 2017, we went back to visit Vanessa’s family. From there, we went to a few tradeshows in Hong Kong and the China area. There was a large tradeshow back then known as the Canton Fair which happens twice a year. We went there and saw a whole bunch of suppliers. We got to know materials, fabrics, and costing. The more quantity you place, the better discount you get. That was the first six months of the year in 2017. We found a supplier that we liked. We presented them with our designs. We were in the sampling phase. 

Vanessa Jeswani: In terms of the design, it was just a sketch on Photoshop. We just did it to the best of our artistic abilities. 

Kish Vasnani: Also in 2017, we were living off of our savings. We both had part-time jobs that were flexible. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani
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