Travel, Order Tracing and Other Stuff

Hi all! We're a week back from travelling in Lake District.  A place to visit if you haven't done so already. Beautiful landscape, lovely people. I can wholeheartedly recommend it! Just don't go there if you're trying to maximise your sun hours :)

Development on Muta has continued in the meantime; below are some updates.

Traceability

I talked about traceability before, and I mentioned that we're trying to create a way to generate more insights for customers on the impact of their orders.

Our very first version of the tracing tool tries to do just that. It's a tad limited in information and a bit slow, but many good things start small.

Head to https://trace.mymuta.com and try it out with a test order number, for example, 1012.

Feedback is very welcome; you can always leave your feedback via the chat functionality on the main website.

Gear Up & Go Fund

Our donations so far have focused on supporting WWF. While I'm super happy with that, we have also evaluated many other initiatives. In that process, we came up with an idea: the Gear Up & Go Fund. This "internal fund" will provide people who cannot afford the gear to experience the outdoors. I'm a big believer that people need to be able to experience the outdoors to truly value and care for it.

We will initially provide trail running kit and climbing and hiking gear. This idea is being worked on at the moment. We're organising the basics and will work this out on our website, communicate on our channels, and provide an application form in the coming weeks.

We will continuously diversify our donations across wildlife conservation, environmental impact, and community support. This one focuses strongly on the community but has a second-order effect on the others.

Note that we also double-offset CO2 (e.g., your order has an impact of 5 kgs, and then we offset 10 kgs). But we don't consider these donations per se; they are just to offset our footprint.

What if there are no profits, do you still donate?

We've stated from the beginning that "90% of our profits are pledged" towards charitable purposes. That said, we're obviously in a startup phase at the moment, which means that today, we do not make any profits. But we have a good plan and strong financial foundations and are sure that we will reach a profitable state in the mid-term.

Until then, we find it important to put our money where our mouth is. :) That means that today, we still consistently donate for every order despite no profits.

To make this more tangible, for an average t-shirt, we today have a direct margin (this excludes overhead) of roughly 8 EURs, of which we donate 4.40 EUR to a project. To give some perspective, today, on that same t-shirt, we're losing around 20ish EURs due to our overhead (payroll & marketing). However, we plan to decrease our per-product overhead quickly thanks to our continued growth. Also, we will put efforts into taking up a more significant part of our supply chain, which will give us better control over garment cost (and quality). 

Supplier Updates

In the coming weeks, we will actively switch suppliers to gain more control over garment finishing, packaging, and shipment. This next iteration of our supply chain should result in better product quality, predictable and adjustable CO2 impact, and a more exciting look and feel. Overall, it will allow for more creativity in our garment design process.

We'll have more updates soon. We'll also share some of this process on our socials.

And, if you don't already, please follow @mymutaclothing ❤️.

Talk to you soon!

Bart