0.7 design
Entrepreneurship takes many shapes and forms. Start-up ecosystem in Finland today is growing richer with stories of tech entrepreneurs hacking their way towards big exits and international success. Social entrepreneurs, however, receive much less glamour and coverage even though their numbers are growing and their stories are just as fascinating. Here’s one such story of a for-profit one-person company that is as much about business as it is about maximizing social impact.
Ten years ago Jenni Moberg spent a year in Japan. Coming from Finland, she recognized similarities in people’s aesthetic values: simplicity of design, preference for straight lines, natural materials and colours are as popular in Japanese design as they are in Finnish. That’s when the seed for the business idea was planted.
It was not until 2007 that Jenni founded her own company 0.7 design that helps Finnish artists, artisans and designers sell their produce abroad, particularly in Japan. She mostly exports small gift and kitchen items, children’s clothing from ecologically grown cotton and things made out of recycled material. The biggest hits in Japanese markets are products made out of birch bark.
When she started she hasn’t even heard of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ yet she was one from the start. Her goal with the company was to promote hand-made Finnish design, help talented artists who often live in remote areas of Finland and lack any business or computer skills to sell their produce beyond the town’s gift shop. Apart from having a social impact in Finland by supporting local producers, her business gives 0.7% of profits for development projects abroad. Right now 0.7 design sponsors a project in Sierra Leone that re-educates local teachers and motivates them to return to work in rural schools.
The most important and most difficult thing for a start-up is to find customers. Jenni started off selling produce of her Finnish designer-friends to friends of her friends in Japan. Little by little that network grew and now her company supplies 20 shops in Japan.
Many artists think that when their items are sold internationally they’d immediately get large sums in income. What they don’t realize is that the retail world works slowly and sometimes you’d need to wait for a couple of months to receive money for the item you sold. The biggest challenge initially was to convince the designers to trust her so Jenni took a wholesale approach to the business: buying the items first and reselling at her own risk. When the business took off and her company gained more trust, that model was changed to give her more flexibility.
The business goes in cycles but Jenni enjoys being her own boss and when you see the spark in her eye whenever she talks about her company, you understand why. ‘Helping people from different backgrounds mix and realize immense possibilities their cooperation can bring keeps me going’, says Jenni. ‘In the future, I would like to have close business partners to help me find new markets in other countries. But more importantly, I want to be an example for entrepreneurs in any field. I’ve gained some valuable knowledge since launching my own company and I’m happy to share it. ‘
Check out Aalto Social Impact – one of the few groups in Helsinki that actively supports and encourages social entrepreneurship.
Wrapping up StartupJam Baltics
In the heart of the old town on a beautiful sunny weekend over 50 people sat in dark rooms glued to the projector screens typing away on their laptops. That was the StartupJam Balticsheld in Vilnius on the last weekend of May.
Our colleagues from the Baltics managed to put together a cool (un)conference that attracted people from Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and even Belarus! In addition to informative workshops we got to know some appealing start-ups in the region. Below is a
short description of some of the presentations from the event.
Tiklist.lt
This local start-up supports local farmers by selling their goods through an online shop. It’s a great example of how to help farmers and deliver organic locally-grown food to people’s homes.
Nebula 44
This ambitious start-up is building an exciting browser-based online space strategy game with a plethora of cool features. The game is in open beta at the moment and creators are promising $25 worth of gaming items if you join and test the game now. The launch is said to be early this summer so grab your chances while you can!
Manodrabuziai
This website helps you sell and swap clothes and accessories. Currently it is oriented only for Lithuania but expansion to UK and Germany are on the way.
While there are a few websites out there that help you exchange and sell things (some Finnish examples being Netcycler and Huuto.net), it’s interesting that this start-up chose to cover one niche only – clothing and accessories. We’re eager to see their progress!
Humanway
This Polish start-up is offering a platform for recruitment that claim to greatly reduce the cost of hiring. They cooperate with existing job boards and use other channels for promoting job offers (careers page, social networking platforms etc.).
BalticReports
Many foreigners do business and live in the Baltics but there is a lack of information and news in English, which makes it hard to invest into local markets. BalticReports is the only online news bulletin in English that reports from the Baltic region with the help of professional journalists. They have experimented with different business models and are currently in search of new ways to monetize online journalism.
Framedy
These innovative guys from Latvia offer ‘the simplest photo-sharing on the web’. Your profile won’t be linked to that of anyone else’s and there will be no ads on your page. They claim it’s ‘so easy – your grandma could use it’. While the service would be free once it’s launched, you’d need to pay $9 to test the beta version unless you get an invite.
…and there were more start-ups present! Best of luck for all of them – it’s exciting to have a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region.
P.S. Taking a roadtrip from Helsinki to Vilnius definitely rocks!
Indie film “Snowblind” & wreckamovie.com use Scred
In a first step of what will hopefully be many, the great online tool for community sourced indie films, Wreck-a-Movie, and Scred have worked together to bring out an integrated web shop for the fantastic indie film production, Snow Blind as part of their funding process.
Go to check it out, purchase a few frames of their film, and participate in their project, or set up your own at Wreck-a-Movie.
This is something that is really exciting as it brings together two excellent products into something even greater. Of course, this is just the beginning.
Scred groups can now flexibly record income/expenses
While Scred’s ability to automatically track and account payments is a real killer, we understand the need to sometimes manually record things. Now you can. Changes in this release (dubbed Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered):
- Manually add income & expense transactions for your group.
- Record transactions to/from a bank account, cash balance or involving one of the group members.
- Transactions can be categorised. Each type of group has a ready set of categories, but more can be added in the group settings. For example, an event organiser can add expenses involving artist fees.
- Browse income and expense overviews with charts in Reports.
- You can set the category of an expense claim.
Adding Transactions
Go to the section Transactions, there you will be able to click to add a new transaction.
Select whether you want to add an income or an expense, then fill in the details. Here we’re adding the rent for a venue for a fictional event. No relation to another party with a similar name 
The event organisers also sold some t-shirts at another event. The money was deposited as cash.
One of the team members, Kimi, paid for a VIP sauna event himself. The best way to register this is to use a Scred Expense Claim, but it can also be stored this way too. The event will now owe Kimi.
Adding New Categories
Each type of group will have a default set of categories they can use for their transactions. Bands will have things like expense categories for music production and studio time, whereas an association will have income categories for membership fees. You can add new categories or remove old ones (assuming they haven’t already been used). Do this in the group’s Settings section.
Reports
To view information on income and expenses, go to the Reports section. There you can get an overview of everything that has taken place during the group’s existence, or to check a specific year or a specific month in that year.
Major release: Announcing our new groups!
Where do we start … it has been a long and arduous process to rebuild the old MiniCorp features which were in closed beta last year. Finally we are opening them up to the world with loads of new functionality. This is the future of Scred and the future of how to manage money.
And no, we haven’t forgotten our much loved release names. We held the latest name back for a special occassion, which this is.
The release is called: Best of Both Worlds.
In this announcement:
- What’s New
- What about the costs?
- The PayPal competition
What’s New
So let’s see what we are announcing:
- A whole new level of Scred money management for communities. It is based on the new PayPal X APIs and is now open in public beta for everyone!
- With the new Scred Groups you can get to grips with your community’s complete finances, in a really integrated and easy to use way. No accountants needed!
- Record expense claims (including attachments like receipts) and pay them out, send invoices, collect registration fees for events or memberships, sell items with your own webshop etc.
- Everything is integrated, tracked and accounted automatically. Income and expenses, profit and loss, and other reports are generated for you. You can forget about fiddling with Excel.
- Make payments directly from within your group’s pages.
- You can think of this as a kind of smart community-oriented online bank. Whereas a normal banking experience is just moving figures from one place to another, we provide a whole bunch of tools to make things relevant for you and your community. We add meaning to money.
- For bands, indie film crews, event organisers, associations, hobby groups, small businesses and I’m sure you’ll come up with many more.
- We have completely redesigned the look to our site.
- We have dropped the terms Pools and MiniCorps from active use. They are both just different kinds of Scred Groups.
- We have entered this into the PayPal X Developer Challenge competition. Please support us by voting for Scred (see instructions)!
Phew, that was a lot of stuff. Needless to say, we’ve been working incredibly hard to get all of this done. While this is still work in progress, we are immensely proud of it. The level of integration and the ambitions for this project are unlike anything attempted before in this area. We believe this is what all financial systems will look like in a few years.
Check out a short video of Scred’s new stuff
For anyone worried: shared expense groups will not be forgotten. We regularly need and use them, and they will be developed. However, we are very excited about these new developments, and we will be working hard to advance them onwards.
What about the costs?
For all money moved by Scred (using PayPal) we will charge 1.5% of the amount transferred (minimum $0.25 or 0.25 EUR per transaction) [1] [2]. This is our open beta pricing and is subject to change after the beta period, but we will keep things decent for our groups in the future too.
Voting in the PayPal competition
Check our earlier post for instructions on voting.
If we do manage to win, we will pass on any waivered PayPal transaction fees directly to our Scred Groups! That’s a total discount of up to $50’000 in fees to our customers. [3]
Tweet this link about voting: http://bit.ly/scred-paypal
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback on all of this. Do not be afraid to click on the Scred feedback link.
Log into Scred to start using the new features.
[1] For payments in US dollars the minimum fee charged by Scred is $0.25 and for payments in euro 0.25 EUR. For payments in other currencies a value equal to 0.25 EUR is charged in the currency of the payment.
[2] Standard PayPal fees apply in addition to the Scred fee.
[3] Applies to fees charged by PayPal, Scred’s standard fees apply.
New feature: settle multiple balances with one click!
Before some bigger news we are announcing important changes to settlement payment:
- You can settle a complete pool balance with one click, even if you would need to pay several people!
- Settlement payments now incur a small transaction fee.
- Transaction fees to PayPal and Scred are paid by the sender of the payment. The people paid receive the full amount.
Previously it was possible to settle balances by clicking on ‘Settle’ and paying each balance one at a time. That was much handier than having to dig out people’s bank accounts and manually entering transactions. However we reckoned we could do better and have now built a way for you to settle your pool debt with one single click, and automatically sending the payment out to up to five members at a time.
So say your pool Trip to Mordor ended with you owing money to Aragorn, Boromir and Legolas. Instead of having to pay each one in turn, you can simply click ‘Settle’ by your balance and select ‘Pay All’. You will be brought to a PayPal checkout allowing you to pay everything in one swift go, and still make it in time to conquer Sauron, and stuff. After all you probably want to settle in good time as things might get a bit hairy up there.
To facilitate all of this magic Scred now takes a small fee of 1.5% of the payment amount (minimum $0.25 or 0.25 EUR) for each settlement (standard PayPal fees apply). Let us know what you think of this feature and how you might like it improved.
Log into Scred to start using the new features. We are using the new PayPal X APIs to provide this.
We will be announcing some larger updates shortly.
P.S. You can help us improve Scred by taking our survey.
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