Ever since I walked into Naadam’s store in Hudson Yards (in pre-pandemic New York), I have been a complete fan of this supercool, sustainable Mongolian cashmere brand.

I caught up with the amiable and articulate Co-Founder Matt Scanlan to find out more about his insane journey that started with getting lost in the Gobi desert, $3 million cash in plastic bags and 150 tonnes of cashmere.

For Part One of this article, please click here.

Afdhel Aziz: Wow. So, there are so many questions I have right now. Let me try to unpack a few of them. How did it change how you were able to help the tribesmen?

Matt Scanlan: The reality is we're helping so many more people that we feel like we're literally changing the economic circumstances for regions of nomadic Mongolians. You go to some of the areas where we're purchasing, and there are schools and playgrounds and hospitals and roads. We build parks. We bring jobs. You know, we've extended our reach as much as possible to make sure that we're not creating more problems by doing this, and ultimately creating opportunities.

We've always worked through the Gobi Revival fund on supporting the local herders that we source from. We've donated hundreds of thousands of dollars by this point. We've impacted hundreds of thousands of people's lives at this point, and millions of goats. But, it's about working within the system. The alternative is erosive and would inevitably undermine our initial goal, which is cultural preservation.

Aziz: What are some of the principles you use in how to focus what you do?

Scanlan: One of our main nonprofit principles was always to really focus on microeconomic sustainability. So, you build things that then are accretive for the community, not a crutch that, if you take it away, they don't have a job anymore. And so, the goal is to reinvest, some form of profit in things that create different types of jobs and bring more education or clean water or whatever they need.

We're constantly confronted with new issues, right? Now there's more goats. There’s a thing called desertification going on. Now we have to offset some of the things that have been happening because of the work we're doing, so now we're working backwards and working on grasslands management and trying to offset desertification in certain areas.

It's a moving target, so what I really need to focus on is staying close to the community to understand what they are telling me, not what I think. We always try and reverse that scenario. It shouldn't be two white kids from Connecticut, coming in and saying, "Hey, this is how you guys should do stuff."

Aziz: I want to ask about what other principles you have from your nonprofit that you applied to Naadam. How else do you think about it?

Scanlan: So, there are a couple of guiding principles for us as an organization. Number one, humility. And let me deconstruct that a little. Humility is a principle of recognizing you're not the smartest person in every room you walk into, which means any setting you go into it's about creating equitable circumstances, so you value what the other person has as much as what you have, both in knowledge and skill, right?

I acknowledge that the nomadic herder works harder than I do. They're stronger than I am. They're more honorable than I am. They're more trustworthy. A host of things. I might be better at seeing the big picture and connecting consumers to product. But we really focus on equitable business partnerships across multiple levels. That's our number one principle and that drives back to this idea of humility.

The other is transparency. You can't be a good partner to anybody, be it from a nonprofit perspective or your customer if you can't show them everything you're doing. And so, we believe that trust is earned, first and foremost.

And integrity. The way I've always thought about it is if you're doing something with integrity you are driving towards results that benefit the whole. You are taking selfishness and ego out of your decision making.

So, humility, transparency, and integrity is the way we do things.

And the interesting thing is these three main principles are really things I feel like I was given by these communities in Mongolia. It is infused in the way we do everything at this organization. Those are our guiding principles. It's how we hire people. It's how we train people. That's how we talk to our customer. It's how we make the product. And it's how we work with these communities to continually get stronger so that we both get stronger together.

Aziz: As you reflect back on your journey, what have you learned? What have you been most proud of?

Scanlan: Yeah, it's crazy to think about, but we're distributed in major retailers around the world. We are obviously sold online. We have our own stores. We partner with other brands, supply them with material. We wanted the Naadam label to stand for something else. We wanted it to stand for sustainability, for values, for doing the right thing, not just great quality. Quality's a byproduct of doing the right thing, in our case, and we want that message to be shared with as many people as we possibly can.

I'm proud that we set out those three pillars of the humility, transparency, and integrity, six or seven years ago, and it's very easy in the course of building a big business to sacrifice things like that don't necessarily impact your profitability. But those things have just become stronger. They've become a reason why we do this, and I'm most proud of the fact that that reason “why” has remained consistent and become increasingly more valuable to both myself, my team, and the customer.

Cashmere, it's very funny. I make women's clothing now and, I don't understand what happened, it's so far from the thing that is our objective. I love the product, too, but it's not my first love. You know, my first love was really thinking strategically about how to use business to create long-term economic sustainability in areas that you're purchasing from. So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey.