So who are the Nae women? In addition of the vegan, who else likes your shoes?
PP: They are primarily an environmental concern and social women, in addition to being vegan. As a rule, people turn to China's footwear, which is produced based on the exploitation of children, women, human exploration in general. This target clearly rejects that. Prefer to buy less and more expensive, but at least know what they are buying. I think that with time there is a major concern for people to know what is behind the product they are purchasing.
May not necessarily be all vegans?
PP: Yes, because we are now focusing more on style and design so people can buy because of this factor and not because they are vegan.
When you launched your first collection was difficult to place it on the market or not really?
PP: We began by initially cast us online and in the social networks to find out what was the brand receptivity, because we had no shop or any industrial strength behind . And found that the acceptance came first from Germany, which is a country which is more ahead in terms of environmental awareness and even this issue of environmentalism are very advanced. These are people who reject certain type of buying process. And we started realizing the interest on the part of the Germans and of Italy which was another of the countries concerned in order our shoes. And in 2009 came the ecological shops interested in selling vegan footwear.
Outside Portugal?
PP: Yes, the acceptance was out of Portugal.
And in our country was slower route from what I can gather.
PP: Yeah, it was pretty slow. Practically we are not present in our country. There are two reasons, one is that there is not still a great environmental awareness, in material terms is not a niche of market. Those who will require it buy online because we have a virtual store and sell enough to Portugal, but do not justify having a shop. On the other hand, we do not have vegetarian stores in Portugal, unlike other countries, such as Spain, Germany, Italy and France. So the approach passed through the multiband stores, but many of them are in financial difficulties and the fact that the economy is retracted does not help a lot for us to penetrate the market, because people always look for what's cheapest.
What is the next step for Nae?
PP: We are working on two fronts. One is to deepen our market penetration in Europe, because we have a lot to do and there is a lot of receptivity of our footwear. We are thinking about giving best prices to brand shops, in order to have a good profit margin and now intend to work on volume and scale to get more strength in the market. On the other hand, we are making the first contacts outside the EU, notably in Australia and China, we have a distributor in Hong Kong who contacted us in order to sell Nae in these countries and we'll see how this approach will run.
In terms of types of collections what innovations are you introducing in the future?
PP: We follow the line of what we have been doing until now; ever bet on eco-friendly materials, for example, wooden soles. Risking on the hemp that is a natural material, tough, is little explored and developed in the right direction for the footwear market. Addressing new materials, such as coconut fiber and organic cotton, since we worked hard around the material, because they are our base in terms of vegan footwear. And then the design is very important for us, we intend to develop protocols with some schools in Portugal, we'll see what happens.
