We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Asatre Team Ethan, Chyna, and Jody a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Asatre Team, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
No matter how well you think you are planning. Some times things don’t go as planned. When we first started, we planned to sell hemp and CBD products so Hempland CBD was a great name or so we thought! We had products made, labels made, website domains purchased, and had applied for our official trademark approval. In the trademark approval process, we received a cease and desist order stating that our name was too similar to someone else’s and we could not longer use it. In tears and frustration, we took down our website, removed all our products, and went to work on finding a new name and identity. This is when Asatre was formed! “Asa” meaning hemp in Japanese, and three of us, for the “tre”. So Asatre… it became! Probably the best, worst thing that could have happened to us. At this point, so thankful that it happened to us early! In the end, it was a very good thing for us as we only sell hemp clothing and accessories.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Asatre started a few years ago, but not as you might expect. It all started in a small spare bedroom in Oakland CA. After graduating from Oaksterdam University, the horticulture school that specializes in cannabis, we learned about the myriad of benefits the cannabis plant provides and wanted to share that with the world. We opened a CBD online store with the goal of spreading its wellness and therapeutic benefits across the US. To further our brand name we began to offer organic and eco friendly hemp clothing with our logo on it. Our customers soon started to ask us to expand more than just a hemp t-shirt, and suddenly we had hemp sweatshirts, hemp yoga pants, hemp backpacks, hemp soaps and more. Asatre blossomed into a high quality hemp clothing store and we ultimately decided to remove our CBD products, narrowing in on the sustainability of long lasting organic clothes in a world of fast fashion. Suddenly the spare bedroom was no longer suitable, and we upgraded to a warehouse full of products, welcomed new team members, and collaborations with new partnerships. The 3 of us founders never imagined we’d be where we are today, but are motivated more than ever to continue to learn, grow and spread awareness of organic hemp fabric everywhere!
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
We initially thought that our website would be the platform! We thought that people would just find us and buy from us. That’s not as easy as it sounds. We have amazing products, delivery, and customer service but selling initially on our website was very challenging. Since our products are custom made for us, eco-friendly, and sort of a niche clothing market, we added Etsy. Etsy has been an amazing source of business. Their support for us has been incredible. We currently are one of Etsy’s top 1% sellers. We have more than 19,000 sales on Etsy and have more than 5,000 – 5 Star reviews. We also sell on Ebay and just started selling on Amazon. We have only a few items listed on Amazon but are very excited about the amount of sales.
Obviously, we prefer to sell on our website. We hand pack all of our orders. We pack them with love… Each item is wrapped with our Asatre paper and sticker. It is placed in an eco-friendly comp0stable recyclable bag along with a free hemp soap sample, instructions on how to care for hemp products. We truly take pride in each order and want our customers to see the value in each purchase.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding our business has never been easy! Maybe someone out there is better than us at finding affordable resources for starting a new business. However, this has been a struggle. When we started, self-funding for a few products was not an issue. However, now when our inventory is at more than $300k, funding is much more challenging. From credit cards, loans, and whatever other resources we could obtain has been used. Thankfully paying off one of our initial $60k start up loans at 18% interest rate on Monday. Each day is struggle, but a new struggle! How do we continue to grow? How do we increase profit margins? How can we better at marketing? We have great products, how do we tell the world without spending our lives savings.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.Asatre.com
- Instagram: Instagram/Asatre.co
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/asatre.co/
- Twitter: @Asatreco
- Other: Tiktok – Asatreco
Image Credits
Madison Smith Brian Nguyen Nadia Almaleh