The entrepreneurial journey of founding an impactful, local, and transparent fashion brand - partnerships & company acceleration

This work project discusses the development of the hybrid D2C business “meiæs”. meiæs is a local, transparent, and impactful fashion brand producing socks and donating five percent of its revenues to the Hope Zones Foundation. This foundation focuses on preserving and protecting the ocean, with a special focus on Portugal’s coasts. Starting with developing a business model using the Lean Business Model Canvas by Maurya (2010), the authors cover essential aspects such as the problem and solution definition, market size, sales and marketing channels, and team. Eventually, hypotheses are developed which are rejected or accepted in the individual parts. The authors’ main findings were that meiæs was not able to achieve product-market-fit yet due to the immaturity of the business but will most probably achieve it in the near future once the first batch of socks has sold out. Moreover, using short-form videos (reels) on Instagram are the most effective form of advertising, and enlarging the company’s network can increase future funding and partnership opportunities. Lastly, meiæs socks were found to be more sustainable due to their low raw material CO2 footprint of only 1kg per pair of socks