Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Did this come to a complete standstill or was there still a business?

Kish Vasnani: In 2020, we did just under a million. Of that, about 70% came from the first three months of the year. The rest of the year was really tough.

Sramana Mitra: Are you still in Bali?

Kish Vasnani: No, we moved to Miami in August 2020.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the situation with the business?

Kish Vasnani: We moved during the pandemic. The business was starting to pick back up.

Vanessa Jeswani: We had periods where things were looking okay. It was up and down. It was tough from a marketing perspective because we weren’t sure how to talk about our product.

Kish Vasnani: We can’t encourage airline travel.

Vanessa Jeswani: Our bag was primarily marketed as a personal item bag. We start talking about the bag as a weekender. We did a photoshoot. It was the fall of 2020 showing the bag for a cabin weekend trip.

Kish Vasnani: We also marketed it as a pandemic essentials bag.

Sramana Mitra: Did that work?

Kish Vasnani: Sort of. 

Vanessa Jeswani: We also ran a sale around the same time.

Kish Vasnani: Yes, we did discounting. We ended up sitting on a lot of inventory.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you’re still in this mode of discounting and repositioning and trying to find another uptick in travel.

Kish Vasnani: Fall 2020 was when we had redone our marketing because we noticed that people were traveling in controlled environments. That was the remainder of 2020. Coming into 2021, we started feeling a little more hopeful. One key metric that we started tracking in 2021 was the daily TSA checkpoint numbers. We could gauge, despite what’s being said on the news, the trend. 

Vanessa Jeswani: Simultaneously, we started to think about product development. We hadn’t introduced a new product. We started to work on some new sketches and decided we want to launch a convertible tote bag that can be used in everyday life as well as in travel. We focused on sampling that new product and did the photography.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the new product?

Vanessa Jeswani: It’s called the Origami convertible tote. It can be used as a backpack, a cross body, and a travel bag. It has a lot of internal organization. It has a laptop pocket, external water bottle pocket, and a front pocket for your keys. 

Kish Vasnani: The way that we came up with that is during lockdown, we started emailing our customers. We invited them to have Zoom conversations just to talk about their favorite places to travel and what they liked about our Bento bag. We found out that a lot of our customers are women. They carry a tote bag whether it’s for everyday or for travel. We recognized this repeating trend.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Has that product hit the market?

Kish Vasnani: We just finished a crowdfunding campaign.

Sramana Mitra: How did that do?

Kish Vasnani: By crowdfunding standards, it did well but it didn’t do as well as we had hoped for. The total raised was around $250,000.

Sramana Mitra: This is not a wild product/market fit yet. 

Vanessa Jeswani: There were other issues at play. We did the same strategy. That campaign drove the bulk of the sales on day one. Then once we were reliant on the Indiegogo community, it became more difficult to track. With the release of iOS 14, there’s a lot less tracking available through Facebook. That has made social media and paid ads difficult to optimize. 

Sramana Mitra: Very insightful point. 

Vanessa Jeswani: It’s tough from a marketing perspective. E-commerce brands are very reliant on paid ads driving traffic. 

Sramana Mitra: Great story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 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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