Entrepreneur

How Two Friends Disrupted the Cashmere Industry, by Doing What Nobody Else Would

The founders behind Naadam took out the middleman in the cashmere world, creating a win-win for the company and the herders.
Source: Naadam Cashmere

On a clear day in June 2015, Matt Scanlan loaded $2.5 million in Mongolian tögrögs into 32 plastic bags, stuffed them into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser and lit out into the desert. 

Scanlan, the then-26-year-old co-founder and CEO of Naadam Cashmere, was headed to Bayankhongor province, one of the most remote regions in the world, located deep in the Outer Mongolian Gobi desert. Each year around the same time, the nomadic goatherds in the area gather in a local village to sell their yield, which consists of some of the finest cashmere there is. 

Related: 7 Steps-to-Success for Clothing Industry Start-ups

Leaving from the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Scanlan spent the next two days off-roading across unforgiving desert terrain with the bags of money piled so high in the back, the driver could hardly see out the rear window. 

When he arrived, it was with a bold, risky plan, years in the making. When he left, he and his colleagues had 100 tons of cashmere, packed into a dozen tractor trailers, and the firm foundations of a socially conscious, sustainably sourced, ingeniously constructed clothing business that’s now on track to gross $22 million in its second full year. 

And like many great entrepreneurial adventures, it all started with a phone call, a dive bar, a good friend and some dumb luck.

Image Credit: Naadam Cashmere

in 2012 when he quit his job as a qualitative analyst at

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur3 min read
Making the Midlife Leap
Sometimes, building the life you want requires a big risk. That’s what Keri Gardner realized when she cashed in $100,000 of her retirement savings to buy a franchise. It was November 2020, and she had just been laid off from her executive role at a h
Entrepreneur2 min read
‘I Won’t Make That Mistake Again!’
When Shizu Okusa decided to start a new business, she knew where to find the best guidance. “I wanted to reverse engineer everything I did wrong in my last company,” she says. Raised on a farm in Vancouver by Japanese immigrants, she’d founded a cold
Entrepreneur3 min read
THE Franchise 500® HALL OF FAME
This year, we at Entrepreneur published the 45th annual edition of our Franchise 500 ranking. As we celebrate that milestone, we also want to recognize the franchise brands that have been on this Franchise 500 journey right alongside us for the longe

Related Books & Audiobooks