About Us
Origins
I'm Rosalie, I live in the Netherlands and I'm the founder of NEOMACHI. I fell in love with Japan and the neon lights in 2014 and have returned every year ever since (up to now due to COVID). I used to have a good job as an IT consultant, but the corpo world, in which I couldn't use my entrepreneurial spirit and creativity made me very unhappy. This was especially the case when COVID hit, and suddenly I was stuck indoors with a job that I wasn't passionate about.
However, there was an upside; I suddenly had more time on my hands, which I used to test out the e-commerce waters. I didn't just want to sell any product though, I wanted to sell a product that I could pour my creativity in and a product that I could feel proud of. Also, I wanted to have a customer base that I could relate to myself, as a techie, gamer and Japan lover.
Luckily enough, I realized that this is a niched and overlooked audience in regard to clothing. It was very difficult to find dope Cyberpunk and Japanese inspired t-shirts that weren't directly anime clothing. From that moment on, I knew that I was going to start making apparel that would fill that gap, and thus NEOMACHI was born.
The name
NEOMACHI means New Town (Neo in Greek & Machi in Japanese). We have a vision in which going to our site leads to a feeling of entering an immersive retrofuturistic city, of which the clothes are just part of. Visiting the website should be a memorable experience by itself regardless of the products on it. We are still working on how to achieve this.
Mission
As we started in 2020 and currently run at a thin margin, our clothes are not as cheap as we'd ultimately like them to be. We have a high standard and want to maintain the best quality, even if this means low margins. As we grow bigger, we should be able to lower our production costs and thereby the prices for our beloved customer.
Community
We know what it's like being treated poorly by faceless customer support and even being hustled by dubious web shops. Happy customers are of the utmost importance for us because we want to feel proud of ourselves at the end of the day. Moreover, we want to ensure that we always remain closely aligned with the ideas, wishes and inquiries of our customer base. Therefore, I will keep on doing customer support, so that I can provide that personal touch which is increasingly becoming a rarity in this mass-market day and age. Ideally, we want to create a continuous feedback loop with our customers so we can always adjust and improve - so never hesitate to drop us a message!
Sustainability
Spreading positivity, both in the sense of happy customers, as well as doing good in the world is what we want to achieve with NEOMACHI. For this reason, every month, a part of the profit will go to a good cause, and the more NEOMACHI grows, the bigger this part will be. Especially, projects that support renewables will be supported as it is close to our heart.
Making clothes leaves a large carbon footprint since manufacturing is a water intense process, but with NEOMACHI we want to not only become carbon neutral, but carbon positive. We will do this by not only creating clothes that will last a long time (reducing need for frequent purchase), but also by offsetting the approximate amount of CO2 that is released in whole processes from cotton to end-product delivery to the customer.
In the future, hopefully NEOMACHI will not be a mere clothing brand, but a whole movement of likeminded people that wants to do their share in creating a bright, sustainable future. If you want to be part of our journey, follow us on Instagram!
The team
The team currently includes me, Rosalie, as the full-time employee, who does everything from product development to customer service and four part-time workers who help with programming, bookkeeping and online marketing. It also includes Sybren, AKA Syb, who can pretty much do everything as well!
Contact
You can contact us by dropping a Facebook message, Instagram message or by email (support@neomachi.com)
Our address is:
NEOMACHI
Bessemerstraat 7
1097 AM
The Netherlands
VAT number: NL861303490B01
To read more about us and our ideas, click to read our blog posts here
