Sojourn Magazine Spring 2017

SOJOURN//SPRING17
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
THE
NEW
NOMAD
WE SPEAK TO NOAH,
CO-FOUNDER OF NOMAD, YOUR
NEW TRAVEL COMPANION
By Azhar Ahmad
First, tell us a little bit about yourself
and your role in the company
I’m Noah, CoFounder and CEO of Nomad.
Like everyone at Nomad, I wear many hats
and my role develops over time. My
number one goal every day is to make
Nomad a successful and sustainable
customer, whether it’s staying up late
brainstorming product concepts with
Brian, the other Nomad CoFounder,
racking my brain with pricing spreadsheets
or having “fun” sifting through various
contracts, it’s about plugging holes, finding
new opportunities and trying to keep
things on the right course. Oh yeah, and
trying to keep the lights on, which can be
tough for a young and growing company.
What made you decide to be in this
industry? What was your calling?
Well, it all started with a problem. I was
living and working in Madrid and had a
company issued Blackberry. My phone
kept on dying and I figured that there had
to be a better way to stay charged on the
go. So I started kicking around the idea of
a tiny USB cable that was small enough to
fit in your wallet. And then Kickstarter + a
great cofounder who shared the vision and
energy made it all possible.
One of your most unique products is the
battery cable. What was the inspiration
behind it?
Brian and I were drinking some wine after
a tough week and talking through some
business challenges we were facing. As a
fun distraction we started talking about
coming up with another product. So we
thought to ourselves, “what is out there
that we could improve on?” We started
talking about cables and batteries, two of
the main product categories for
smartphone accessories, and Brian said
“battery ... cable?” And voila. It seemed so
obvious from the moment he said it. There
were some existing products that had a
very small battery and very short cables,
but that functionally didn’t really give you
much juice on the go, around 10% of an
iPhone 6 Plus, so we wanted to make one
that could give a serious amount of charge
to your phone on the go. Battery Cable an
iPhone 7 Plus over 50% and gives close to
a full charge to an iPhone 7.
Another product that we love is the Tileenabled
PowerPack. We never knew we
needed to keep track of our power
banks until we saw this. What was the
reason behind this unique collab?
Powerbanks are a core product category
in mobile accessories, but there were
already so many of them, so we didn’t just
want to make another boring powerbank.
We loved the idea of crowdsourced
Bluetooth tracking and we figured that by
integrating Tile we could offer a
powerbank that was truly forward-thinking.
To round it out and make it categoryleading
as a powerbank, we put in quickcharge
USB C ports and even a lightsensor
so that the charging lights don’t
annoy you when charging at night. We
always try to anticipate what’s next and be
one step ahead of the industry. We don’t
take our customers for granted, we want
to offer them something special with
everything we launch and continue to win
their support over time.
How long does it take to create a
product? And how do you choose the
materials?
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