Hemper Handmade

Since I was little, I have always shown a special interest for projects of social and environmental impact. In High School I started a project in order to measure the amount of water waste people generate while they shower, and trust me, it is not little. Out of the many projects I started in college, Sheedo was the first one to generate turnover, becoming my first company! A couple years later, I started the company I currently lead, Hemper Handmade. 

I have always felt a spark inside of me, like a tireless motor that has always pushed me towards new challenges. These challenges have never been easy, but with the help of the motivated and high achieving people that I have surrounded myself with, we have worked to bring those forward always inspired to change things for the better.

Hemper is a project of change. We work towards the social and economic development of Nepal and by doing that we want to show the eastern world that there is a way of doing business responsibly. We are a BCorp certified textile company and therefore believe that change must be done in equal ways in each part of the world.  

Our project elevates humanity in different ways. First, it is sensitising the whole community of clients we are interacting who, by supporting us, are becoming active change-makers. On another note, we are developing the nepalese community by creating jobs with fair wages and conditions, while embracing their culture at the same time. At last, we are giving them the tools to be active innovators in their communities through their work, so that if Hemper ceases to exist, they can keep nurturing their own development. 

Right now and during the course of these last three seconds, 3 persons have fallen into poverty because they were unable to pay a doctor, 190 tons of garbage was generated, 600 kilos of plastic have been thrown into the ocean and 48000 euros have been transferred in the spanish economic system. This is the world in which we live in; one part of society produces and the other part of society consumes. And so is the industry in which we have decided to work in, the textile industry; the second most polluting industry in the world. 

In Hemper not only have we been able to see this problem of pollution, inequality and poverty in humanity, but we have also been able to experience it first hand in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world. 

The problem is not your clothes nor the garments you wear. The problem lies within their production, your attitude towards them and their producers (planet and communities). 

In Hemper we have decided to step into the textile industry in order to completely redefine and change the predefined rules of this industry. We are thriving towards change in each of those parts. 

Hemper is a company founded upon the model of triple impact: people, planet, profit. We want to contribute towards the social and economic development of Nepal selling backpacks and accesoires in Europe. These products are produced by families at risk of social exclusion in Nepal, which we instruct and give the necessary tools so that they are able to earn their living through their work. We also provide for their childrens' education, so that they can become innovators in their communities the day of tomorrow. 

As of our environmental impact, we decided to use sustainable materials such as used rice-bags and hemp, one of the most environmental friendly materials, to produce our product. 

At last, we thrive towards economic profit through our products sales, in order to make our project sustainable and allow it to grow and expand, impacting as many lives as we can. 

With Hemper, we hope to be a guiding light for other businesses and show them that social and environmental change goes hand in hand with economical and business growth.

In Hemper we work together with families from local communities which are at risk of social exclusion. Hemper focuses its efforts to help the families in Budhanilkantha, a neighbourhood In Kathmandu, Nepal, to produce and treat traditional hemp to make our backpacks.

In order to understand their needs and get to know them better we try to spend with them as much time as possible whenever we are in Nepal. In fact, two of our team members live in nepal in order to be fully and constantly in touch with them. Apart from providing fair work for them, we carry out several social projects such as “The algorithm is female”, “Clean up Budhanilkantha” or “The waavers program”. 

These programs arise from the needs that we see are not being covered. Many of the woman that are working for us have small children which get in the way of their professional lives. For this reason, we created a tuition program in which a teacher takes care and educates the children while the women are able to fully focus on their work and provide for their families.

With these and many other programs we try to support women empowerment.

The project does not arise from a grandiose idea, in fact, it was very simple. Once the volunteering in nepal was over, several of us wanted to stay in contact with the community. We were looking for an excuse, in order to be able to go back. 

My friend and co-founder Alex, had started importing some backpacks he had bought there and had begun to sell. He started out with about 20. Surprisingly the backpacks were sold out within days, much faster than what we had expected. 

Quickly he started to talk his friends into it; he began capturing us with his great ideas and expectations about the project. And as you can guess, i quickly fell in love with it, together with three others. 

On October 2016 the five of us founded the company and soon went from part time freelance working to full comitment with the company. This has luckily been maintained until today. On our journey we have hosted several events about nepal, we have made various journeys to the country and were able to get involved with the community constantly.

My passion starts several years ago, as a volunteer in nepal. There i immersed myself in their culture and their way of life. I have always wanted to help people; i even wanted to become a doctor. But when i was there i got news, that i had not been chosen at the university. My whole life turned upside down. Soon i realised that i wanted to go back to nepal. There i had become conscious that our way of life is not as good as people may always think it is. It is not our way of life and not theirs, in it is both of each combined where i saw beauty in. I soon became really passionate about the objective that we created in common, helping towards the social and economic development of the country, by bringing back the tradition of hemp. There i also saw, that work was adreessed with joy. The focus does not lie within generating richdom, but enjoying what you are doing. This lies tight together with my own pursue, showing the world that there is a way to help and do business, without having to sacrifice other things midway, such as helping others.

If you ask the nepalese Sherpa Kami Rita, the woman that holds the record of most times having climbed the Everest, but has to work as a cleaning lady at homes or supermarkets in order to provide for food for her children; why she is well-positioned to deliver her own project, her answer would be, because she likes it. Obviously if you ask any woman working in Europe, her answer would be, that she has education, she has acces to assets and a brighter reach in audience, in order to generate impact. 

The truth is that probably the woman that more capable to deliver her project is Kami. The fact that i was so lucky to grow up in a high class society, may give me some startup help, but the passion which the woman is fighting with, in order to keep climbing every 8000 meters mountain without any outside support, cannot be implemented by any kind of society, it lies within her. 

Luckily i can say that i have inherited a similar passion throughout my life. With 16 i won the first price in entrepeneurship for "Small Businesses" and with 24 i was chosen as the Spain women entrepeneur of the year 2019.

But the same as if i was cleaning a supermarket, i face daily struggles and challenges, but at the end of the day, what allows me to deliver the project is my inner will and the conviction, that i am doing what i like doing.

The first challenge i faced with when i started working on this project was that as a white woman in nepal, my authority was almost non-existent. Whenever we had meetings with the suppliers we work with, they would not talk to me directly, nor accept my decision making. They would always rely on the man of the group, who they would be listening to whenever we would want to close a deal. Therefore i had to go through quite a process, in order to show them that i was just as capable to make decisions as a man. 

Another example of adversity is the latest situation in which the company was as by last year in november. About half a year ago, we found ourselves in technical bankruptcy. We were having some bad times and would have not been able to keep on working on the project. Soon we decided that we would not give up, we wanted to survive. This is when we raised crowdfunding, selling 25% of our shares. At the end we obtained far more money than what expected and today we work even harder to meet with the trust and expectancies that so many people.

September 2019, Hemper and Ironhack partner up as part of a kickstarter project,"The algorithm is female". Common goal: Give a girl in nepal the opportunity to travel to Spain in order to learn programming at Ironhack. The common purpose: Break gender barriers, age and family background towards programming. 

Now, it was mine and my teams responsability to pic a girl in nepal, a developing country with little or no contact to technology, with outrageous skills and motivation that will be able to provide enough impact in order to carry the project. 

Problem was, i had no idea of programming myself, nor could i imagine under which skills you should be choosing a programmer. Soon i started contacting several universities and ongs in nepal. My idea was to start a Kackathon of three days, where girls should be introduced to programming skills and should be tought to learn how to program an app. From there they would have to come up with an idea of social impact in nepal and develop it. They should recognize, that with their skills and knowledge, they are already able to be a changemaker within their society. 

The project turned out a success, no girl surrendered.

Hempers innovation does not lie within the creation of an avant-grade production process or anything close to that, instead it lies deep embedded in the supply chain. 

Just as in all companies, there are also certain innovations, within Hemper there are also some. The new packaging consists of reused rice bags picked up from the polluted rivers in Kathmandu, or our latest products, which are made out of remnants of elder used products, people donate to us. Nevertheless, our biggest innovation comes from recovering the century old tradition around hemp, from the most profesional Hemp-workers in the world. This is why we chose to work with families at risk of social exclusion, since the are the ones who know how to work with hemp the best, the plant with the greatest O2 regeneration power. A plant, that is completely antimicrobial and does not need any type of pesticides nor herbicides and that helps to save up to 200-500 litres of water with a 1 kg production in comparison to cotton. 

And this can be closely linked to our form of social impact. Because we did not randomly choose a poor community and decided to start working with them. Instead we saw how much value the rural families of nepal had and decided to give them power in order to improve their situation. But as just said, through the value they hold in their actions. 

The basis for our project is to develop and empower communities in risk of social exclusion around Nepal and to do so in an environmentally friendly manner with the use of traditional hemp. 

Hempers path towards financial sustainability is to be defined as an integrated model. 

Through the selling of our backpacks, we want to generate sufficient turnover for the company to maintain financially stable and be profitable. Yet, this has not been possible so far. Since we have started our business four years ago, we are still in a process, where we want to spread our brandname and image in order to have gained a good position in between textile brands. This would make it possible for us, to generate from our sales enough revenue to keep growing and be profitable. Nevertheless, until we reach that point, there is financial support needed, so that we can invest it in putting the brand out there. 

But as said before, Hemper has an integrated business model, where our social activities overlap with our social projects known as "Hemper and the 17 SDG". This is an initiative, where we want to partner up with bigger companies in order to fulfill each one of the 17 goals that have been set up until 2030. By coming together with big brands, we want to show how it is possible to ensure a part of sustainability in any form of business and how you can transport the handcraft of nepal into each polluted sector of the textile industry. So far we have met with 10 of the 17 goals and are just in the process of finishing our products for our collaboration with Springfield. 

Hemper has accounted for two revenue sources as for the last 12 months. The first source are Hempers own sales from the products it creates. Within the last year, Hemper has generated about 267788.99$ of revenue with its own sales as of the last 12 months. 

On the other side as said previously, Hemper was at technical bankruptcy and had to raise an investment round, in order to create sufficient funds so that they could keep on working. The crowdfunding round was done through the organisation "La Bolsa Social", a crowdfunding platform, where only companies with a positive social impact can obtain financial support. The amount of money raised is about 396002.14$. 

In return on the investment of "La Bolsa Social", we gave away 25% of our equity.