Sales are gradually reaching the millions, customers live in 60 countries worldwide, even on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, and investors have also discovered Don’t Waste Culture – even though the Dutch streetwear label is only two years old. How is that possible?
The latter is not entirely correct. Bas Dijkhuis founded Don’t Waste Culture back in 2013, but when popular DJ Don Diablo asked if Dijkhuis would take over his branding, Dijkhuis pushed his own brand aside. When the collaboration with Don Diablo ended after four years, Dijkhuis continued to develop merchandise together with his business partner Karel Kloeze, whom he met at the Dutch Saxion University of Applied Sciences. In 2019, the two won the Saxion Entrepreneurs Award with their Brand Your Merch concept.
Brand Your Merch was doing well, but Dijkhuis couldn’t unleash his creativity, he says in a video interview with FashionUnited. “Don’t Waste Culture was still on the shelf, the community hadn’t disappeared yet. So we decided to relaunch the brand, with everything we had learned in the meantime.” At the beginning of 2020, the label was back on the market and now Dijkhuis and Kloeze want to grow. Last week an event for press, buyers and influencers took place in Amsterdam. A good moment to get to know the label better.
Is Today’s Don’t Waste Culture Like 2013?
Dijkhuis: In terms of the idea, but not in terms of aesthetics and certainly not in terms of branding. Don’t Waste Culture was more of a hobby project back then, I just got started. Now we are building on that with a new concept, better products and new branding.
What are the most important lessons you have learned in the meantime?
The most important lessons we learned were in the design area. This is an essential skill if you want a brand because your product needs to sell. We gained a lot of knowledge about design and about textiles, we explored different product groups. We also learned a lot about the whole webshop thing: how do you grow a brand online? We are really leaders in this area. We are commercially very strong online.
Their customers come from 60 countries worldwide. How did you become so big in such a short time?
Kloeze: After the relaunch of Don’t Waste Culture 2020, a third owner came with Rutger Bemers. Bas is creatively strong, I’m more of a commercial type, I like to develop the business further. We always lacked a third pillar.
Rutger is a numbers person. We always call him our ecommerce guru. He’s really good at targeting via Instagram, Facebook, Google, TikTok… This allowed us to expand the audience we already had in the Netherlands to other countries. There are customers for high fashion streetwear all over the world and we can see that in our orders. For example, we regularly receive orders from Guam, an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between America and China.
How do you find customers on Guam? Is that a coincidence, or are you aiming for them?
Dijkhuis: The biggest part is really the targeting, the technical online marketing that we do, or rather that Rutger mainly does. We run global campaigns ourselves. But we also work with influencers, for example from Germany, who are very large and have a global network. So we reach customers in different ways
Which countries do most of the orders come from?
Kloeze: The Netherlands and Germany, followed by Great Britain, the United States, France and Italy.
Dijkhuis: We are also building up a lot in the Middle East, and Scandinavia is also an up-and-coming market, but it is still a long way from the German market.
Who is your target audience?
Kloeze: Our primary target group are young adult men between the ages of 18 and 35 with a penchant for streetwear who want to attract attention. Our target group is looking for an outfit that not everyone else is wearing. By the way: More and more women are also ordering from us.
Dijkhuis: Precisely because we are getting more and more orders from women, we want to involve them more actively. For example, we recently did a photo shoot with a woman.
There are quite a few emerging streetwear brands that focus on hoodies, t-shirts and jeans. What are you doing to differentiate yourself in this area?
Dijkhuis: We bring international trends to the Dutch market that haven’t arrived here yet: trousers with separate closures at the ankles, such as buttons or zips. For us, the details make the difference. And the quality of our t-shirts is what keeps our customers coming back to us.
Kloeze: Distinctiveness is at the heart of Don’t Waste Culture. The idea behind the brand is this: don’t let your identity, origin or culture hold you back, but use it as your strength to stand out and do good for everyone.
Speaking of doing good: what do you do in relation to fair working conditions and sustainability?
Dijkhuis: We work with ecological fabrics from Peru. Less water is used in production than with conventional cotton and almost no pesticides are used. We manufacture in Portugal, Turkey and China and each of our factories is ISO certified. This year we will also visit our factories ourselves.
Kloeze: That was difficult in recent years, but fortunately it was also possible to communicate online.
Building a brand will by no means have been easy during the pandemic.
Kloeze: We had setbacks: last year’s winter collection was supposed to arrive in September, but it wasn’t delivered until January. Back then, communication was even more complex, today we’ve streamlined it – if we’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s good to keep communication channels as short as possible. But there was a moment when we really didn’t know where our collection was. That was exciting, especially as a new brand. It worked out well in the end: the collection was delivered and we were able to sell it that year, but we missed the boost of Black Friday and the holiday season and that was hard to swallow.
Dijkhuis: But for an online brand, we actually started at the right time. We took advantage of the fact that people couldn’t physically shop. During this time, our turnover has increased enormously. In this respect, we were lucky with the relaunch in early 2020. Meanwhile, online sales are a bit stagnant.
Kloeze: We are also active in physical stores: five in the Netherlands, including Concept R in Eindhoven and Reload Store in Rotterdam, and three internationally. We want to present our brand even better externally, we’ve been working on that lately and that’s also one of the reasons why we’re organizing the event in Amsterdam. I have a pretty specific list of retailers that we’d like to work with . I invited them all and many of them come to see. We want to show: That’s us, that’s what we can do.
What are your wishes and goals for the future?
Dijkhuis: We want to keep growing, no matter what. If we could dream really big, we would like to become the biggest Dutch brand on the international market. That’s what we all work towards every day.
Kloeze: We’re working very hard for it and we think we can do it. We are a strong team and we gather around us more and more people who are very good at what we do. When we work together, we can achieve great things. Another important lesson: you will not achieve anything alone. You have to do it together, give people opportunities and responsibility. When they accept them and you can see how bright they are – that’s the best thing about entrepreneurship.
This translated and edited post previously appeared on FashionUnited.nl.