Samara Bags and Soular Backpack: Founder Salima Visram on Securing Your Own Bag
What started as a project during Salima Visram’s senior year of school to support children who did not have access to electricity in Kenya transformed into a fashion line that Visram is running with her sister in Toronto, Samara Bags. She started Samara Bags with a $500 budget, a sustainable bag that turned heads, and a commitment to sustainability and now the company almost 3 years old and has ballooned into a retail brand that is consistently selling out its products. Samara just sold its 100,000th bag and recently launched a line of eco-friendly grocery bags and sunglasses that sold out in mere minutes. In this interview, Visram talks to us about her founder journey, sustainability, and even offers some calming advice.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Abena Anim-Somuah: What inspired you to start Samara Bags?
Salima Visram: My mom had passed away in 2017 and at that point, I was two years into working on Soular Backpack, which was set up as a social enterprise. I had to keep asking people for donations and at the same time I was looking for an everyday bag for myself, and I couldn’t find one that I liked — just a nice, classy handbag that wasn’t overtly branded, that was affordable. I didn’t really care for it to be leather and wanted to to be made from something innovative.
Frustrated by not being able to find a bag, I had a design in mind so reached out to our supplier for Soular to see if they could bring my vision to life. I wore the bag to a conference and kept getting stopped by people asking, “What’s this bag? Where can I get it?” I only had $500 to play with so I reached out to our factory, convinced them to let me test this out, created a Shopify store, put 10 bags on our website, and they sold out overnight.
This got me thinking that there was something here and it could be the marriage of building a sustainable business with products that people want and love, and funding a social impact initiative that is needed in the world. It was our goal to create pieces that were designed with sustainability
It blew my mind that 1.2 billion people rely on something that’s so detrimental to your health to complete simple tasks like cooking or needing light.
Abena: That’s incredible. Tell me more about what inspired you to start Soular Backpack.
Salima: Growing up in Kenya, I noticed how a lot of kids my age weren’t able to do their homework because they didn’t have access to stable electricity. I felt like I was in a position where I had access to an education and the resources to help and that came with a responsibility to do something. This got me thinking that there must be a really simple solution that can be safe and still allow people to have access to energy. In my last year of university, I convinced my professors to work on building Soular Backpack in exchange for class credits.
In 2015, we launched a Kickstarter, designed a backpack with a solar panel on it that would enable children to walk to school during the day and have enough energy charged up to do their homework at night without kerosene lamps. Kerosene is a carcinogenic jet fuel that over a billion people rely on as their primary source for light.
It blew my mind that 1.2 billion people rely on something that’s so detrimental to their health just to have enough light to complete simple tasks like cooking or reading It was even more shocking that people were spending 25 percent of their monthly income on this fuel.
After working on it for two years, we moved manufacturing to a plant in Kenya where Soular backpacks are still produced today. We also ended up working with Disney to distribute the backpacks in East Africa and launched a one-for-one model where a purchase of one backpack goes to a child in need.
Abena: You started Samara Bags with $500 and have not taken any funding from venture capital firms or angels. The company has scaled to selling 100,000 bags. What is it like bootstrapping your own company from the ground up?
Salima: I always wondered if I was doing something wrong because I felt like everywhere around me, there was all this news about different companies raising money.
I was always questioning if there was a way to grow the company without taking on venture. So we started with 500 dollars and tried to see how long we could go with that while trying to take on more money. One thing that we constantly come back to even as we scaled is “How can we stay as scrappy as we were when we had that first 500 bucks?” We try to do everything as efficiently as possible because we’ve realized that most of the time, it’s possible to find a scrappy way of doing things that works just as well.
Obviously, bootstrapping comes with challenges. For the first year, I didn’t take a salary — we also had an instance where we lost all of our inventory and didn’t have a safety net to fall back on during our first holiday season. Despite that, I’m grateful that bootstrapping has given us the freedom to grow on our own terms and to make choices based on what was best for the company, our customers, the communities that we were serving, and for our supply chains.
We will definitely get to a point where we will need some venture funding and I look up to so many female-run VC funds that we would love to invest in us. For the time being though, bootstrapping has been a fun journey.
Focusing on slower, steadier growth for our first two years has also enabled us to connect with our customers in a way that has been organic and authentic. We’re always designing things with our customers and based on their needs and have strong relationships with them, with the goal of being a brand that is always intentional - — this has had so many hidden blessings as we’ve never had a style that has not sold out and we’ve never had to throw away any excess or waste material, which is rare and almost unheard of in the fashion industry. With COVID, so many fashion brands we’ve looked up to that are much bigger than us have had to pull orders or not pay their factories. Thankfully, we’ve stuck to every purchase order so far and I attribute this to our customers and finding the sweet spot between sustainable growth and intentionality behind the things we design, produce, and ultimately provide to our customers.
One thing that we constantly come back to even as we scaled is “How can we stay as scrappy as we were when we had that first 500 bucks?”
Abena: With the surge in more sustainable fashion companies or companies making efforts to be more sustainable, what do you hope to see in the next 5 years?
Salima: I think sustainability is a term that is being thrown around a lot right now. I was reading one of my favourite books, Let my People Go Surfing by Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard. He talks about how they don’t even mention the word “sustainability” in their vocabulary and yet they are recognized as one of the world’s most sustainable brands.
In the journey of sustainability, Chouinard talks about being neutral with the world. With true sustainability, you’re giving the same amount that you’re taking away from the world, which is near to impossible. Sustainability is a goal and an ongoing process, not a destination.
At Samara, we feel really lucky to be at a point where we can think of our supply chains as starting from scratch so there is an opportunity to change how sustainable our supply chains are compared to some companies that have established chains, and we get to define it for ourselves in a time where fashion needs to change and consumers are demanding that change. Additionally, sustainability should go one step deeper when it comes to the relations that you are building with your manufacturers and employees.
Abena: Tell us more about the philanthropic arm of Samara Bags, with the Soular backpack, and what inspired you to start that part of your company.
Salima: In the spirit of giving, we started a meal program originating in the village where I grew up and where Soular backpack is created. In just a short while, we gave away 165,000 meals, which is the equivalent of three elephants. Considering that we were profitable from day one, it allowed us to start the meal program much quicker than we presumed. As a brand, we know that there is power to create change in the world.
I think everyone wants to support female founders and female entrepreneurship based on this perfect idea of female founders but then challenge them when they’re not able to uphold that standard. I think that reaction has been challenging because I constantly think of how to be a good leader, showing up for your team and community as much as humanly possible, in a way that is fair, whilst also focusing on the growth of your company. I’m excited to learn a lot about this as we grow.
Abena: What is motivating you right now?
Salima: Trying to figure out how we can show up for our customers and give them what they need, where they need it. Obviously in the last few months, people aren’t buying as many bags but we wanted to see how we could support our customers. We reached out to our community and it seems like people were looking for a prompt-based journal. This motivated us to go back to the drawing board, crowdsource journal prompts, and create a product that our customers really wanted. Ultimately, we are not a business without our customers so we want to do everything we can to support them and not just sell them things for the sake of it. It’s really important to be intentional about what we do and how our creations add to the lives of our customers.
Abena: What is the most rewarding and the most challenging aspect of the founder journey?
Salima: The most rewarding part has been meeting fellow female founders on their journeys and realizing the resilience that women have. There is a strength that comes with just turning your ideas to a reality, which is amazing because a lot of women tend to stop themselves and think that they have to have everything right before they start. Seeing this resilience has been incredibly inspiring for me and motivates me to keep growing Samara.
On the other hand, the most challenging thing in the journey is trying to undo this idea of balance and being perfect in every way. I think everyone wants to support female founders and female entrepreneurship based on this perfect idea of female founders but then challenge them when they’re not able to uphold that standard. I think that reaction has been challenging because I constantly think of how to be a good leader, showing up for your team and community as much as humanly possible, in a way that is fair, whilst also focusing on the growth of your company. I’m excited to learn a lot about this as we grow.
Never give up. Failure happens to everyone and is a part of every journey — I always say, “I fail multiple times a day, but failure isn’t failure unless you give up.”
Abena: You’ve mentioned that the fashion world is one dominated by men even though they are mostly serving female clientele. How do you think Samara bags contributes to shifting the narrative with female founders?
Salima: This is something that I realized a few months ago reading some articles and wondered who runs all these female-directed brands. I was shocked because it seems like all these female clothing brands that are targeted towards females are run by men. This was so shocking but I am also optimistic about more women creating brands that are made for us and by us. Ultimately, who knows what women want better than women? I think as more women band together and support each other to create with ourselves in mind, we can shift the narrative and create more equality in the fashion industry.
I also believe that it starts with the next generation where from a young age, women need to, or girls need to know that they’re capable of doing what they want and being whoever they want to become.
Abena: What are three pieces of advice that you think every female founder should have in their arsenal?
Salima: Find a practice that grounds you. This can be anything that is only for you to do at the end of the day that can help you reset. For me, it’s meditation. It’s a practice that is really personal to me and I do it right before I go to bed because I find that it’s a good way to set myself up and quiet my mind for a good night of sleep after a long day.
Build a solid network. Find a group of people who you can rely on in supporting you in this journey. Whether that’s other founders or close friends and family, it’s really special to have a group of people who can support you and hear you out. This could be anyone from people who are a few steps ahead in building their companies to experts in a certain function of your industry like operations or retail management. Additionally, having friends who don’t work in your field is great to have as well because you can talk to them about things outside of work. It’s really important to have that balance.
Never give up. Failure happens to everyone and is a part of every journey — I always say, “I fail multiple times a day, but failure isn’t failure unless you give up.” It is not a destination but rather a pivot or a redirection. Having that understanding of failure earlier on in my career would have helped me stress less at the time.
