Antonio Nuño, Fatima Álvarez and Enrique Rodríguez have been friends since they were 5 years old. As teenagers, they became volunteers helping indigenous communities, first in Mexico and then in other countries, where they discovered that many of the women were artisans.
Nuño recalls that the trio noticed these artists “making very beautiful things in a very sustainable way,” and by the time they were 25, a business idea was brewing. They envisioned connecting these artists “with their craft and their stories and with the supply chains of global companies looking for ways to make products in a more sustainable way.”
And so Someone Somewhere was born in 2016. Today, the Mexico City-based startup is on a mission to work with hundreds of rural artisans in seven of Mexico's poorest states to adapt traditional handicrafts into clothing and accessories to create “high-quality, on-trend products.”
The startup helps groups of artisans organize and formalize as cooperatives and small businesses, access bank accounts, and open joint savings accounts. Artisans get paid for each product they make: Someone Somewhere supplies the materials and pays them 50% up front and the remaining 50% each time the product is completed.
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In the first few years, Someone Somewhere signed deals with big companies like Ben & Frank (Warby Parker in Latin America) and Rappi. But in 2023, the three companies realized they could scale the company even further by using AI, specifically Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image models.
They fed a database of different materials and techniques used by artisans into Stable Diffusion's model and began designing AI-assisted concepts for famous products as images. The idea was to show companies what some of their most iconic items would look like if made by artisans in different regions.
They posted their concepts on sites like LinkedIn and Instagram and tagged companies — for example, they created images for Red Bull and Trader Joe's.
But a LinkedIn post in March of a concept for an Adidas-branded Mexico national soccer team jersey changed the company's business. The post quickly went viral, eventually racking up more than a million views, with people tagging Adidas employees in the post to draw attention.
In his post, Nuño estimated that each shirt “generates six months of fair work for over 3,000 artisans” and “enables over 15,000 people, including their families, to break the cycle of poverty.”
He writes: “It is not hard to imagine what would happen if Mexico's next uniform were made in collaboration with others to incorporate elements hand-embroidered by different communities across the country. It would be the first time a national team has undertaken such an initiative and would undoubtedly inspire dozens of other countries to follow suit, since crafts are the second-largest source of employment across Latin America, Africa and Asia.”
Image credit: Someone Somewhere
Nuño said Adidas contacted him just one day after posting and asked to meet, and within a few weeks, the company had signed a deal to launch physical products for adiClub members, Mexican soccer players, and content creators.
In total, the marketing posts reached more than 50 million people and were featured on national television and in more than 100 media outlets, according to Nuño. On June 21, the two companies unveiled a new collection of Mexico national team jerseys hand-embroidered by female artisans in Sierra Norte, Puebla, Mexico.
Each shirt was hand-embroidered over 11 hours and symbolically represents the 11 players who proudly represented Mexico in the Copa America.
“Through these jerseys, adidas and Someone Somewhere aim to celebrate the work of Mexican artisans and continue to embrace the country's cultural heritage, both its roots and the seeds it leaves for future creative generations,” Pablo Cavallaro, adidas' senior director of brand activation, said in a statement. “The collection is inspired by the communities where artisans create their pieces, the spaces they call 'home.'”
The shirts sold to the public will include Someone Somewhere’s signature detail, a QR code, allowing the user/buyer to learn more about the artisans involved in creating the shirt.
“Currently we are working on a further project with Adidas that will be launched next year,” Nuño said.
AI helps create jobs
Nuño attributes his startup's recent growth to advances in AI.
“We realized that building products with AI could help companies see what's possible and move forward,” Nuño told TechCrunch. “And that's helped us partner with a lot of companies, mostly based in the U.S.”
This strategy has worked so well that Someone Somewhere went from designing 10 products per month to 5,000.
“This is helping us accelerate our growth and is a great way to demonstrate that AI, when used creatively, can not only take jobs, but also create new jobs,” he added. “In the last 12 months alone, we've built over 10 million products with this model.”
Meanwhile, Someone Somewhere's revenue has grown 36x over the past three years, and its 75-person team is working with three times as many brands this year as it did last year, largely thanks to co-developing products using AI.
The Stable Diffusion model that Someone Somewhere uses was introduced last year and allows users to tweak the concept images they create.
“We can control the silhouette of the product,” Nuño said, adding that this allows his startup to experiment with fabrics and embroidery as it develops concept products.
“Until now, our main bottleneck was showing companies the potential of what we can do together. You have to create a physical product, and that takes a lot of time. This technology opens doors. They say an image is worth a thousand words. Now we are able to connect with these big brands and the conversation moves much faster,” he said.
As a result, Someone Somewhere has landed co-branded sustainable accessories lines with Gator Cases, as well as co-branding deals with companies like Google, Uber, Stripe and Amazon to produce merchandise for their employees, events and marketing campaigns.
QR Codes Win Apple Supplier Contracts
AI isn't the only thing driving Someone Somewhere's growth.
The company also landed a deal to sell some of its products in Apple stores around the world and online, coincidentally through the use of QR codes. The products are made through a partnership with a company called Nimble, which makes sustainable electronic accessories. Someone Somewhere sells the products to Nimble, which then sells them to Apple.
Nimble CEO and co-founder Ross Howe is a Delta One business class customer, and the airline gave him an amenity kit made by Someone Somewhere on a flight last year.
“The item was neatly packed in a fabric bag and immediately caught my eye,” he recalls. “It was of such high quality and even had a QR code that let me meet the artisan who made it. By the time my plane landed, I wanted to learn all I could about the company behind the bag and explore opportunities to work with them.”
Nimble already had some concepts for new products, including carrying cases, but “we needed the right partner to build them,” Howe said. “In addition to their obvious design capabilities, Someone Somewhere's mission and its Certified B Corp status met many of the criteria we were looking for in a partner.”
So the company reached out to find out more.
Now, the company's new Apple Exclusive Collection features a series of PowerKnit travel kits with USB-C charging cables. Each kit comes with a travel case made in collaboration with Someone Somewhere. The pouches are available in Apple stores in 30 countries, including the US and most of Europe.
“We've been researching companies for years that we could potentially collaborate on this type of project, but nothing like what Someone Somewhere is doing has been done before,” Howe said. “We're exploring additional projects that we could potentially release in the future.”
This growth comes after the company has raised just $1.7 million in total funding to date from investors including Dila Capital, GBM Ventures, Kalei Ventures, Louis Jordan, Soldiers Field Angels and Unreasonable Capital.
Someone Somewhere has been profitable since 2022 and is in the process of raising new capital “to capitalize on the clear and growing trends of nearshoring and sustainable sourcing,” Nuño said.