Jaswig - Fully

After a couple of years we started to grow really nicely here in Europe, we got our first employees and really were growing the Fully brand here in Europe. Our website, logistics, marketing was set up and the brand started to hum.

We grew it to a couple of 100k of revenue a month.

Fully wanted to grow even faster and started to look for capital. After months of talks they got in contact with Knoll one of the biggest furniture brands in the US. Knoll was interested in buying Fully.

Couple of months later the deal went through and Knoll acquired 100% of Fully for around $ 50M. This meant we could grow even faster because we now had access to Knoll's network, capital and knowledge.

Our co founder who was living in the US to make Jaswig big there started to want to come back to his family here in Europe and thus was searching for people who wanted to resell Jaswig in the US. Just around that time we learned about the company Fully. A B-Corp from Portland, Oregon. Very quickly the discussions moved towards a potential acquisition.

After a couple of months of going back and forth we decided on selling our business for shares in Fully, the mother company. The goal was to bring Fully to Europe and we were going to be the boots on the ground to scale it. It was a wonderful collaboration.

We were really focussed on creating something sustainable. We launched the jaswig brand in both the US and EU and set up local production in continents because we wanted to have the production as local as possible. Because we still had a major impact on the environment (although we were trying to do everything as good as possible) we still wanted to go one step further.

Because of our beloved brand, Patagonia we started to think about becoming part of 1% for the planet. This means you donate 1% of your revenue to a good cause. We choose "Natuurpunt" a local organisation that is trying to create more biodiversity all around us here locally in Belgium.

We were not yet making any profits nor had a salary but still we were donating 1% of our revenues to a good cause because we believed it was an important part of our story and brand. And more importantly we just wanted to do it.

With a group of friends we had been talking for a long time about starting a business but as we were still in college we never really brought it super far as we still needed to focus on our studies. After graduating we started our jobs but not so long after that we thought, now is the time to start something.

We sat together and each pitched an idea and the goal of the evening was to choose one idea and go for it. Which is exactly what we did. We quit our jobs and started Jaswig a ergonomic furniture D2C brand that we wanted to scale throughout Europe.