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What's up everybody? Welcome to a new episode of the All Things Croatia podcast.
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I'm your host, Stanko Zovak. Born and raised in Los Angeles, I'm now living in Zagreb and studying the Croatian language.
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In this series, I'll be talking with people both in the homeland and around the globe who have connections to Croatia.
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We'll hear from business owners, returning the osbora, influencers, musicians and artists, athletes, and the biggest Croatian celebrities that will return my calls.
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But enough about me. Either Moldavia, and let's get started.
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Alright, welcome back to the Croatia week podcast everyone. Hope you guys are doing well.
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Today we have a special guest, Domagoj Boljar, co-founder of Miret.
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Miret is an eco-friendly shoe company from Croatia that focuses on making high quality shoes with minimal environmental impact.
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Their materials are natural and bio-based. They combine sustainability with comfort.
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In this episode, we're going to hear from Domagoj and dive into the inspiration for Miret and what makes it so special.
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Domagoj, thanks for coming on the podcast.
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Thanks for having me.
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Before we dive into Miret and hear about the company, just tell us a little bit about yourself.
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Introduce yourself a little, your background, where you grew up, what your education was.
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At this point, it's hard to separate me from Miret.
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So I'm always talking about the company and never about myself. So this is a change for sure.
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I grew up in Dugoress, that's a small town near Karlovac. Karlovac is near Zagreb.
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We grew up in a suburban house by the forest setting.
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I grew up with my brother, who is actually the creator and the genius behind Miret.
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I'm the one helping him make this dream a reality. So it's hard to separate myself from him, my brother Herve, of course.
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Yeah, we grew up in an entrepreneurial environment.
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From day one, our father was always an entrepreneur. He was an electrical engineer, electronics engineer actually.
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And he had his own tech startup in the 80s, which transitioned into a shoe factory in the 90s.
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Really strange jump and career switch, but nevertheless.
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So both of us are really keen on education.
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So I decided at one point, after finishing high school, I decided to study entrepreneurship.
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And my brother studied industrial design. So yeah, that's my background.
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I actually like to specialize in running an SME. That's basically it.
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So yeah, that's my background. Again, it's really hard to separate myself from my brother, because all our life we've been pursuing the same interests,
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playing in the same band, pursuing same hobbies and hanging out with the same crews.
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And this translated into us now running our own startup together.
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That's really a blessing that you were able to do all these things together with your brother.
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That's really cool. And we'll have to get into that band a little bit later towards the end.
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Don't let me forget about that.
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So you said your dad had a tech startup and then the footwear business.
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Did that inspire you at all in the beginning? Yeah, that's sort of an interesting leap.
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Did that inspire you at all?
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The leap was because of the war. We were basically really close to the front.
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So all economic activity virtually stopped for two or three years in our area.
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We weren't so heavily hit by the war, but economic activity was hampered.
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So this previous business that was a tech, he was actually producing machinery, various types of machinery,
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exporting throughout the world. But after that war, that business couldn't be continued anymore.
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So he was looking for, okay, I want to produce something. What can I produce?
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And then he found an inch in footwear at that moment. It was just circumstances were so.
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So what inspired us all our life is the resilience that he had.
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And that entrepreneurial spirit of being your own boss and of course encountering many issues and problems along the way,
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but finding ways to cope. That was one inspiration.
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And the other inspiration was that an engineering way of thinking.
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But I think I have more of a technical kind of mind.
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And it's also with my brother, industrial design is not like making, actually, like creating a product from scratch.
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So it's more of a technical thing. So this is where we come from this kind of mindset.
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So yeah, but actually our father was against us joining the family business at one point.
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Because he knew how, yeah, you know, being an entrepreneur is always difficult,
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but being an entrepreneur in a post socialist country that was plagued by this war and was not part of any trade association.
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It's much more difficult than it normally is. So it's difficult, but we had even more difficulties.
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So we went through like booms and busts with the family business number one and the family business number two.
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So we were always in crisis mode. So he wanted us to find a life that's not so crazy.
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I don't know what the world would be. So he was against it, but I think it was so much embedded.
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Yeah. But this kind of way of life was so deeply embedded into our DNA that we just couldn't stay out, which led us to after he passed,
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which led us to our own booms and busts. But through this we built a sort of experience, but also extreme resilience,
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which actually led us to being recognized as sort of veterans and that we are worthy of investments and second chances and stuff like that,
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which is something that's normal in the US, but it's something new and it's a paradigm shift in Croatia.
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So we were blessed that in the same time that we decided to run this project as a startup, that the whole ecosystem actually and the mindset finally came into place
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and something like this is possible in Croatia, finally.
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Yeah. I'm sure the end of Yugoslavia and then the beginning of independent Croatia was not an easy time for businesses and the economic situation.
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So that does make sense.
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Yeah. And it also was, you had the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global economic crisis and on top of that you had the war, so it was like a really crazy time.
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But yeah, tough times make tough people.
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Yeah, exactly. And let's get into a little bit now, Miret. How did that start?
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How did you guys come up with that specific idea to make ecologically friendly shoes?
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Was that something sudden or was it something you guys have been thinking about for a while?
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Yeah, there's this Hollywood moment, a Hollywood drama moment that actually happened.
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We kind of started working in our father's company, I would say I started working 2009, 2008, I think.
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And my brother joined us in 2010 for a while. We did a small project together, then he came back to college and got back to the company in 2012, I think.
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In 2012, my brother and I quickly transformed our father's business into, I would say, a small shoe factory which offered like a full service, like a turnkey service for luxury brands to get their luxury sneakers developed and produced in one place with a very little hassle.
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So we were quickly making a name of ourselves in Europe, especially in Paris and in Amsterdam amongst luxury brands as the go-to guys to get their projects realized.
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And to do that, to do the shoe business as we did it, my brother had to travel around and visit canneries in Italy, shoe producers, outsoul producers, component producers, other factories.
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And he saw with innocent eyes stuff that other people didn't see, the way that the waste is treated, the way that people are treated, the way that the leather is tanned.
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And he saw this huge ecological impact before it was even a global subject.
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Sustainable fashion wasn't even a coined term that at that moment microplastics were in the subject.
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And he saw that people are blind to this huge ecological impact of footwear.
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But mind you, this is around 2014 where no one is talking about that. And one day I went into his office and at that point we were doing well, having these high-end luxury brands, B.I. clients and everything was like peachy.
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And I entered his office and he's like, he's distraught. He's really distraught and he's yelling at me like, I can't do this anymore.
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We're producing garbage. We're producing garbage and we want to be part of this anymore. We've got to change. We've got to change.
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It was much more dramatic than I can dramatize at this point because I had no idea what he was talking about.
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We were doing really, really quality stuff with high-end luxury materials, like high-end leather with amazing companies.
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But he had an effifty. He felt that everyone is blind to the problem and that he wants either out or he wants to try to find an alternative.
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So, at that point we had very little resources, very little time that we could devote to this project because we had a machine that we had to run, which was not allowed to stop.
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A factory, a development studio, the fire needs to keep going and the lights need to stay on.
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So, a little by little he started to investigate alternative materials, started to make some concepts, but really not knowing how to start, where to start.
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So, yeah, not to take this, we could talk like an hour about this, but this was the birth of an idea, a start of a project that for us took years and years.
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So, in the first, I would say, from 2014 to 2018, it was always on the sidelines, it was always something that we dreamed of doing, but we were not able to really devote ourselves to this.
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So, yeah, it was in the making for years and this is something that, there's a huge difference between the US and Europe and Croatia specifically, is that you're afraid to really completely reinvent yourself,
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but we managed in the end in 2019 to leave the business behind and just fully devote ourselves to this project.
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I'm sure that was a tough decision, I mean, at least for you on your end, because you weren't seeing what your brother was seeing at the time when he had the idea to switch and as you mentioned, you guys were doing well.
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So, I'm sure that was tough to get back to business and try something new.
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Yeah, but we had a Black Swan event in 2018 that actually was a blessing in disguise.
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So, this business that we were doing was growing, but it wasn't without issues and problems and ups and downs, but we were managing and we were growing from that, 2014 to 2018.
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In 2018, we were on the brink of doubling our business, going from three clients to six clients and we were considering expanding and everything was looking really, really well.
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But then suddenly, in spring 2018, there was a perfect storm that all of our clients encountered their own problems, various problems, like crazy stuff that you have six clients and six clients at the same time encounter really big issues and they all decreased their orders.
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And we were like, okay, should we continue this? Should we try to salvage the business that suddenly is encountering huge problems? Should we try to salvage it at any cost?
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Are we ready to really put ourselves on the brink to try to save it or is this a perfect moment to just dissolve the company, leave everything behind and pursue what we've been trying to pursue for years?
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And so, yeah, we took that chance and dissolved the company and took us a year. It was a really, really tough year emotionally and financially and in every sense of the world.
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But yeah, after a year, we managed to leave behind and give it a decent burial if you may. And then we were off. Then we were off from spring 2019.
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We could fully devote ourselves to this and now looking back, we were in luck that it happened to us. Sometimes life throws you a bone when you least expect it.
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Yeah, sounds like a blessing in disguise, you know, in a way. I want to talk about something you touched on earlier, you know, the problem with regular shoes and how much waste and, you know, what the materials are.
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You know, I want to ask you what are regular shoes made of and what's the main issue with that and how does MIRRAT solve that ecologically?
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So, there are many problems with the way that the humans consume, you know, but we need to consume and everything the humans do inadvertently has an effect on the environment.
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The only thing that companies and consumers and governments can do is to try to mitigate the effect or try to change the way that we produce and consume.
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So, sustainability in fashion is still an umbrella term, you know. I think there are a lot of companies and brands trying to like find the perfect solution or the least bad solution for the environment.
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And our approach is unique in a way that we are putting ecology first and trying to find and develop and implement materials that in their core are at least toxic or least negatively impacting the environment.
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So, what this means is when you take a look at a regular shoe, a classic shoe, it's either made from leather, natural leather, or from various types of materials that are basically oil derivatives.
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So, when you look at sponges, polyesters, rubber, synthetic rubber, and like faux leather, like artificial leather, the Kolefico leather, but it's anything but.
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So, all of these materials are oil based and they're basically plastics. So, you have a problem with a lot of plastic being created having a huge CO2 footprint.
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But also the materials when they're disposed of, they last forever, you know, and they degrade into microplastics which pollutes the oceans and the earth.
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So, we decided not to use recycled plastics because we see it as moral hazard, you know.
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You have a situation now where secondhand plastic, recycled plastics are more expensive and more sought of in the market than virgin plastics because it's so cool to use recycled plastics.
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So, we decided to use materials which are as virgin as possible and as close to nature as possible.
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So, just go back to leather. Natural leather is a fantastic material. It's durable, it's pliable, you can do amazing stuff with it.
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But it stands with so many chemicals and heavy metals such as chromium and the purpose of tanning as a process is to preserve leather so it can last forever.
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So, again, you have a problem that this material is not natural anymore and the whole process is heavily polluting.
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Even in Europe, and not to talk about the, to mention the third world countries where ecological conditions in tanneries are nowhere near the western world.
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So, you have the problem in obtaining raw materials, you have the problem while making materials and then when you produce the shoe, you have a certain percentage of cutoffs.
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You know, when you cut materials to make pieces that are then stitched together, you have at least 20% of material that is being discarded.
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And all of these materials that are like production excesses, they are treated as dangerous hazardous waste and need to be disposed of by the companies, by the shoe factories.
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But then the question arises, what about the other 80%? The other 80% is in the shoe and all the materials are fused together in a way that they cannot be disassembled or recycled in any way.
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And consumers, after consuming the product, they don't have any choice but they discard it and it ends up in a landfill and it's impossible to dispose of it in an ecological way.
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So, the whole process is terrible from the raw materials, from the way that the materials are produced, the shoes are produced and in the end the way that we consume.
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So, our sneaker at the moment is 97% bio-based, which means that our materials are made from plants and New Zealand wool.
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And we just recently finished our life cycle assessment, our CO2 footprint and it's also insanely low compared to classical footwear.
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I will exceed the number here because we are keeping it a secret and we will unveil it very soon.
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So, I don't know if I've been clear, this is such a difficult subject but basically it's that we are changing the paradigm of how shoes are made.
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And we want to show not just to the consumers but also to other industry players that a shoe made from natural materials can look nice, can be fashionable, can be comfortable, can be durable and can have a minimal effect on the environment.
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And it's not like you guys only offer one shoe, right? Like you have different models of shoes, plant-based, all the same, 97% ecologically friendly.
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Yeah, exactly. Now we have two basic files but this year we are launching a few more.
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This year is going to be like a year of expansion for us. We've proven our product market fit and now we raised another investment round and we're looking to scale significantly this year.
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So, yeah, there's going to be a lot of stuff coming from us but it's not just about our brand, it's just not about our product.
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We will be opening ourselves in our technology and recipe to other brands and we want to help other brands to implement these principles.
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So, we're going to build near it not just as a shoe brand but also let's say as a benchmark, as a proof of sustainability for other brands and we want to help them implement this into their products.
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So, let's say a semi-open source kind of thing.
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Interesting, yeah. So, you guys are sort of then leaders right now it seems in Croatia as far as ecologically friendly shoes and you're trying to start a whole trend.
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And in my eyes, I've only been there like the last 11 months but from what I've seen it's sort of becoming a trend.
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I can see the ecologically friendly, you know, vegetarian trends, things like that. I can see them start to become more popular. So, do you have any thoughts on that?
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Yeah, I wouldn't think of near it in the context of Croatia. I think we are not the global forerunner.
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I wouldn't say global either because we don't have the largest market share but I think we are the most extreme brand in the world at this moment.
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And some of the things that we will unveil in the next period will scientifically prove that we are the most extreme brand in the world sustainability wise.
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So, yeah, I'm quite confident now to say something like that and our aspirations are definitely global.
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Maybe it will take us longer than it would take an American brand but I think our approach is so genuine and so extreme that we will raise a lot of dust really soon.
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I know it sounds really confident but yeah, we are so confident about that.
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I think Croatia is catching up with the western world very fast. We always were following global trends but I think the main problem is that the purchasing power here is not so great.
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So, if you would create a product as near it targeting the creation consumer it would inevitably fail.
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So, we were kind of adapting our pricing, our product, our strategy to the global market and that's how we perceive it.
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I don't know about these last two years, we are not really social years as you might imagine.
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We were also in sort of lockdowns so I don't know how the trends are changing.
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I think people were wearing pajamas mostly in the last two years.
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We will see how the world is going to change once we are done with this pandemic.
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Yeah, definitely. Right now it's untreaded waters and anything that's coming next we just have to see what happens.
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I want to touch on the crowdfunding campaigns. You mentioned the funding earlier.
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You guys had two of them, at least two. You had on Kickstarter and on Thunderbeam. I know about those.
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How did those go for you guys? Did you hit your goals? Was it well received?
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Yeah, these were two completely different kinds of campaigns.
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This is one of the limitations in Croatia. You cannot actually access Kickstarter directly so we had to go through an intermediary.
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For us it was the purpose of our first Kickstarter campaign is to raise some eyebrows, to get the brand out there
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and to prove to our early stage investors that people are really interested in this stuff
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and also to prove to ourselves that as a team we are able to realize this kind of project.
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I always compare Kickstarter to Climbing Mount Everest. You haven't climbed it once you reach the top.
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You climbed it once you got back down to the base camp alive.
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In our case this was running the campaign, getting funded and then actually producing the product and fulfilling it.
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We launched the campaign at March 2, 2020 and nine days after that the US shut down the border due to the COVID crisis
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and the World Health Organization pronounced officially the global pandemic.
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Our campaign was actually alive for seven or eight days but in that period we managed to raise $70,000.
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That was perceived as a huge success but we were really ready to take it to 150 or maybe 200,000 euros and we were ready for that.
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But still this was deemed as a success and we successfully fulfilled our backers three months after that.
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We got a lot of positive PR, we got a follow-up investment based on that.
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That was the purpose of our Kickstarter campaign but this last campaign was a crowd investing campaign.
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We were actually raising a part of our investment round through crowdfunding, equity-based.
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For us this was really important because we are not just an ecological brand, we are a social responsible company.
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We said if we are going to raise a round in this early stage and we have so many people supporting us through Kickstarter
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but also through other ways and other means, we said let's give our consumers and partners and friends an opportunity to become part of the company in an early stage.
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So we launched this campaign and actually now we have 211 shareholders coming in through a syndicate
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and these are people like from $300 to $50,000 or $60,000 tickets but for various motivations and reasons
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and I think it was really really great success because we opened ourselves to the public in a very early stage.
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We are really proud of that.
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I do want to get a little more into the business side now that we are talking about this.
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Specifically within Croatia right now, what is it like starting and running a business?
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Is it tough? Are they starting to become more westernized in terms of business development and regulations regarding that?
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I think it's... I started working as I said in 2008 and I see that a lot of stuff is changing to the better
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and especially in the last I would say three to four years.
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It's getting easier and easier and the tech sector is getting stronger and stronger.
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We have two unicorns now which was unimaginable even recently.
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I think the conditions for doing business in Croatia are improving by the day.
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We are due to adopt the Euro from January 1st, 2023.
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We recovered from this crisis really really fast.
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I think the country is definitely going in a really really good direction.
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And mind you I'm not an optimist by evocation.
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I'm pessimist when I need to be and an optimist when I need to be.
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So I really think that this is an amazing time to be in Croatia.
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Everyone is talking about Estonia in Croatia and in Europe as an example of a country that developed really fast through their IT sector
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and the startup ecosystem and that happened once Skype was sold to Microsoft.
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They called it the Skype moment for Estonia and I think we had this moment in Croatia just last year
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when many things happened.
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We had our first unicorn InfoBeep signed to buy companies in the US.
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And Rima is getting on the map with purchasing of Bugatti and these huge things that were,
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if somebody told you five years ago that these things are going to happen in Croatia,
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everyone would laugh at you.
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But now this momentum is huge and people are actually starting to move to Croatia
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and starting their life here working for IT companies in Croatia rather than moving out of Croatia
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and finding IT jobs somewhere else.
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So I think the trend is changing.
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But also there's a huge I think decoupling going on between production sectors
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and traditional industries which are finding it's tough to be competitive
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and having really low wages and then the IT sector is booming where the wages and conditions are really,
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not above average but multiple fold above average.
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So yeah, we also had really good tourist seasons in the middle of the pandemic which was also amazing.
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We haven't suffered so much.
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And also the lockdowns here were really not so bad and I think we're going to get out of this pandemic period
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much stronger than we entered it.
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Which is not really something that's normal for Croatia because in the past when we were in crisis,
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when everyone was in crisis, we had the crisis deeper and longer than the rest of the world.
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So this is like a welcome change.
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Yeah, it's cool to see them recovering faster.
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I sound like I'm from the government but trust me, I'm really not a person that's already optimistic when optimism is not due.
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Yeah, is someone paying you to say all this?
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I wish.
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No, no, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's definitely cool to see Croatia making international headlines business-wise
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and more than just that place with the beautiful beaches.
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It's becoming more than just that which I think is really cool.
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But also of course the beaches are beautiful. I'm not complaining about that either.
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As far as ecologically friendly, are there any incentives from the government to start businesses like that or it's not at that point yet?
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That's also changing.
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But Croatia is now part of the EU and so EU policies are directly implemented here.
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So you have the Green New Deal in Europe.
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Almost all of the new EU grants schemes and investment, EU funding schemes are either directly directed to green industries
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or if they're not, you have to meet at least the basic level of sustainability criteria,
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which are actually ecologically-wise, blah, blah, blah.
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We have a VC fund that's invested in us in pre-seed stage and seed stage and now they're following up for the third time in this bridge financing.
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Now for this third round, for example, they need to do an official external survey of our sustainability status of the company in order to get funded.
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So these are the kind of changes that are happening.
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So I think only the companies that are really taking sustainability seriously will be able to benefit from these government or EU financing schemes.
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It doesn't mean that you need to have an extremely ecological product, but you need to have a holistic approach to the governance,
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a part of the company, also the ethical standards and ecological standards.
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So I think it's a good time for a company that's ahead of its time in all these fields.
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So it's definitely a good moment for green companies.
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Yeah, that seems to be the direction in which people in the world in general is heading.
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And speaking of that, what sort of plans are there for MIRRAT in the future?
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We have two revenue streams. One of our revenue streams is this direct-to-consumer thing, selling our products direct to consumer via e-commerce.
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And this year, ambitious plans to really, really grow in this field, but we will still be targeting Europe.
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So we're basically targeting EU plus Norway and Switzerland, which are not EU countries, but are still a part of the continent and the trade.
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The next step would be expanding to the US and Southeast Asia, but I think this will be earliest in spring 2023 or maybe even later,
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because I think we have a lot of room to cover in Europe.
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But our revenue stream and our line of business is the B2B collaborations, and we really want to partner up with other fashion brands or sport brands
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and help them co-create products that are more sustainable than their current products and give our name as a sort of a seal of approval for their sustainability.
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So we are actually looking to expand to the US rather through these B2B collabs, rather than establishing our own business and going in our brand,
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because you need to realize that if a company in the US gets 100 million euros or dollars in funding in Europe, that's like 10, and in Croatia, that's like one million.
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So you really, even though there's venture capital, but it's peanuts compared to the way that American companies are evolving and growing.
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So we will be trying to leverage this knowledge that we have and infrastructure and brand awareness that other brands have established.
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That's our long-term goal, and short-term wise, we are doing two really, really important ecological certificates for our products.
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We started B-core certification. I hope we will become the first B-core certified company in Croatia.
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Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's crazy time for the company. We are still a team of nine and challenging times, but yeah.
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Wow, so you're still only nine employees then?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't have our own production anymore. We are actually sourcing production in Croatia.
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So we do everything else outside of the production issues. So we do everything except the production process itself.
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But we supervise this process also. So we are leaning in the sense that we don't have our own factory, but we are reducing creation of food factories.
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So yeah, we are a small team still, but like two years ago, we were a team of one and a half.
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Who was the half? You or your brother?
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I was working another job to make hands meet. We are a little done. We are crazy for sure.
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Well yeah, but it seems like inevitably you guys will have to start expanding. It seems like you guys have big plans. That's really cool.
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I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. I'll let you off the hook now. I want to give you a couple fun questions, some easier questions for you.
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I was looking on the website and it looks like you and your brother are big hikers. Is that true?
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I wouldn't say big hikers. We started mountaineering like two or three years ago when we go on Velobeat and other mountains like two times a year.
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We have a team of four people that set ourselves a goal that we need to go on a high mountain at least two times a year.
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But before that we were musicians as I said in the beginning.
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So yeah, we were trying to hike and mountaineer more and more.
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We also like skiing but we're down to one or two days of skiing a year and one or two days of mountaineering a year because we are both parents.
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I have two sons. My brother has one son. So it's family first, business first and then everything else second.
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Yeah, well I'm sure you're busy as hell with everything going on. Let me ask you about the band. I forgot already that I was going to ask you about that.
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Tell me about that. You and your brother were in a band together. Do you guys still play?
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No, we stopped. We had to stop completely. We had a prog rock band from second grade of high school up until I would say three or four years ago.
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And we were really, really serious about that stuff but not like building a career but we were doing our own stuff inspired by Tool and King Crimson and Massive Attack and a lot of other bands.
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We were doing our own stuff and we were really like an eclectic band. Every Saturday from early morning till late evening or rehearsing and doing stuff.
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And we were like straight edgers about that. No smoking, no drinking, no drugs. Just using every Saturday and every moment available of our life to do some eclectic music.
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And after we started this business we just had to let it go because we couldn't do it half-assed. But we were really proud of what we recorded and what we did at that time.
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We actually didn't release everything that we were planning to do. We might release it at one point in the future.
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When people ask me how is it to work with your brother, 15 years in a band together, almost classmates in high school, we were living together in college.
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So everything was really, really well connected. We were always connected. I'm proud of that prog rock period of our life.
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Did you see that tool coming to Croatia? Is it this year?
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They come to play with Croatia. I haven't heard because we're going to Berlin to see them in May.
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But you are going. All that will be really cool. I'm jealous. Let me give you one last question here. One final question.
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I've been involved in some discussions over here in Croatia with friends about taking your shoes off when you go into the house. What's your take on that?
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In Croatia, I hold no position on the matter.
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It doesn't matter to you. I respect how the host wants. For me, it doesn't matter. I can be barefoot, I can be in socks, I can wear my boots, whatever the host wants.
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I honestly don't care.
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I'm good to know that didn't help me at all. I just kind of wait and see what they tell me, I guess.
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But Domegoye, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you got a really busy schedule to come and talk to me and be on the podcast here.
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I'm really looking forward to seeing what Mirret is going to be up to in the future and I'll be following you guys.
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Just thanks for coming on the podcast.
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Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, man.
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That's it for today's episode of the All Things Croatia podcast.
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Thanks for tuning in and I hope you all enjoyed it.
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You can subscribe to the Patreon and check out the All Things Croatia Instagram page to stay updated.
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Feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or ideas and make sure to tune back into the next episode.
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Thanks again and vide moste.