How the Husband-Wife Team Behind Nomad Lane Raised $2M for the Bento Bag

Bento Bag came to life when a husband-wife team made the sort of travel bag they’d always wanted. Learn how Indiegogo can help you bring your product idea to life, and Easyship can help you deliver to your backers around the world.

Company Name

Nomad Lane

Headquarters

New York, NY

Industry

Travel

Shipping & Fulfillment

Nomad Lane was founded by a husband-wife team that loves to travel. They got their start creating a handful of thoughtful travel accessories, but their long-term goal was to design the ultimate carry-on item, the Bento Bag. When it came time to release it, they used crowdfunding to find a community of like-minded business travelers who would appreciate the Bento Bag’s thoughtful features and sleek aesthetic. They raised over $2 million, fostering a thriving business in a crowded market and helping travelers around the world.

Campaign Stats

$2M+

raised for Bento Bag on Indiegogo

48%

of backers were already part of Indiegogo’s community

25%

of revenue was driven by Indiegogo’s marketing

9,700+

backers

6,793%

of original goal raised

43

Backer Countries (25% International Backers)

The travel bag they’d always wanted

Travel has always been at the core of Vanessa Jeswani and Kish Vasnani’s relationship. The pair has visited 42 countries together, allowing their romance to develop alongside their wanderlust. “We started Nomad Lane a few years ago based on our shared passion for travel,” says Vanessa. “Travel is a big part of our story.”

They got their start designing small organizational accessories, like a passport wallet and tech organizer. And with a few product launches under their belt, they were ready to do something bigger.

Vanessa and Kish had identified a problem: there weren’t any bags that met an airline’s “personal item” size specifications that were both practical and understated. “We saw a lot of bags out there that were really functional, but we wouldn’t want to take them to a work meeting,” says Vanessa. So the Nomad Lane founders decided to design the bag that they themselves would want.

But creating a bag was going to take a much larger investment than the travel accessories they’d made in the past. And in a crowded market, they didn’t know if the bag would find an audience and generate demand.

The support to make the Bento Bag a reality

Vanessa and Kish started to look into crowdfunding, and observed that travel bags often found their target audience on Indiegogo. Travel bags do well on the platform because early adopters use Indiegogo to find a bag perfectly tailored to their needs. Vanessa and Kish knew that Indiegogo would be the perfect place to test out demand and find backers to put their bag into production.

Vanessa and Kish knew they had to build momentum for their campaign well before it started. “We knew we needed at least six weeks to prep before launch,” says Vanessa. “Everything we read about crowdfunding said that we needed to be ready on day one.” Thankfully, they had support from the Indiegogo team to help them build a strategy for success from pre-launch all the way through their campaign and beyond.

Thanks to Vanessa and Kish’s hard work and a well-designed product, the Bento Bag met its crowdfunding goal in its first hour. And once the campaign found momentum, it just kept going. The Bento Bag campaign went on to raise over $2 million.

The fulfillment strategy that worked for everyone

Vanessa and Kish initially struggled to find a fulfillment strategy that suited their needs. They wanted to be able to give their customers clear, affordable shipping rates by using multiple couriers and leveraging warehouses in locations close to buyers across the world.

To do this, they integrated Easyship with their campaign. They were able to use the shipping platform’s “Get a Quote” feature to easily compare and use different couriers, were able to offer transparent shipping rates and taxes and duties, and send over 15,000 Bento Bags to backers in 43 countries. They were also able to use Easyship’s expertise with direct injection into the US and EU to save on import tax when sending products to backers in both regions.

To make the whole shipping process smooth, Nomad Lane was also able take advantage of Easyship’s automations and shipping rules to save time and money. This included using automatically generated customs forms, easy pickup scheduling, and setting product dimensions to get accurate shipping rates.

The result? Nomad Lane was able to slash its shipping costs by 20% and improve their operations by shortening their logistics times by two days.

Nomad Lane’s Winning Strategy

Appealed to a target customer

Nomad Lane made the Bento Bag specifically for frequent business travelers who needed a bag that would look good with business attire while keeping them organized. They even coined a hashtag specifically for the Bento Bag to illustrate its ability to go from the airport to an office: #BoardingtoBoardroom.

Built an email list before launch

You can’t spell “crowdfunding” without “crowd.” Nomad Lane built their community prior to their crowdfunding campaign by running giveaways for their smaller tech accessories. It let them build a robust email list of 30,000 travelers. And because business travelers rely on their calendars, Nomad Lane used a widget that let dedicated backers add a calendar notification to alert them when the campaign went live.

Tested their messaging

Prior to launching their campaign, Nomad Lane learned that the bag’s size and aesthetic were most important to their target customer, so they ensured that their product photos showed the bag fitting snugly under an airplane seat and looking chic in business settings.

Continued selling post-campaign

Nomad Lane still had additional stock after their campaign ended. Indiegogo’s InDemand feature allowed Nomad Lane to keep selling Bento Bags on their campaign page until they ran out, without having to go through an e-commerce site or set up redirects.

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