Why we are closing our shop

Dear WONDA community, 

We are closing our shop. It has been a tough decision for us, but from an objective point of view the decision has been made already months ago – we just didn’t want to believe it. Since we have always been sharing our progress with you, and you have been the major factor of our progress, we would like to share our reasoning with you. 

But first, we want to say “thank you” from the bottom of our hearts. Without your trust and engagement, we would have never been able to make the experience that we had. You are the reason, why we enjoyed every single bit of the progress. Together, we created a different way of buying swimwear and later sportswear. Every single progress has been defined by you and our common belief that every body is beautiful and that we can build sustainable products that are better than non-sustainable products if only we listen to what we really need. 

Our values and beliefs have always been the core of our decision-making. Although Kim and I both have a business background and we knew that we could only be sustainable when our business is sustainable as well from a financial perspective, we never wanted to compromise on our values and beliefs. So we made compromises on the financial side. 

Our main aim in creating WONDA was to prove that we can create a value-based company for the sake of proofing and experiencing it. You can believe us, it has been so much worth the experience, but after some time we realized that we could never sustain both of us working full-time for WONDA with the business model that we had created in the first place. 

Roughly a year ago, we had to take a decision: Investment-heavy growth or doing business on the back burner. We decided against growth because we believed that we had to make compromises in sustainability aspects with scale and didn’t want to enforce the emotional trade-off that we already had at that stage. To be honest, two other major decision factors were, that we knew that the fashion industry was not our “home” and that we had no growth experience. 

We started to automise a lot of processes, except for the community support (thanks a lot Lina for all your dedication, at this point), and kept things low-key. Kim and I both got a job to gain growth experience and worked on our own growth. 

The past year brought a lot of challenges, that we didn’t see coming and that basically made us realise that we currently don’t have the energy and dedication anymore to give our company and especially our community the attention that is needed and deserved. 

We still believe strongly that doing sustainable business is the only way to actually do it, and we definitely know what we would do differently next time. We are gathering our experiences and learning and will share them with you next year. If you are interested, we are happy to connect with you on LinkedIn. 

Teresa LinkedIn

Kim LinkedIn

Leave a Reply