With a background in venture capital, Matt Scanlan co-founded Naadam with his business partner, Diederik Rijsemus, by traveling into Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and purchasing 60 tons of cashmere with $2.5M cash packed in plastic bags. They realized that by partnering directly with Mongolia’s communities, Naadam could secure the world's finest materials at a fair price, and pass that savings to their customers, avoiding the astronomical markups that are commonplace in the cashmere industry.