Glance@theCommunity is the platform to meet and engage with the entrepreneurial community of the ECE Campus. Today we continue our weekly interviews by introducing you to two guys with a disrupting concept. Rick Scharnigg and Olivier Momma, co-founders of Ekster Wallets, that after a successful Kickstarter campaign are now building a dynamic team around the new payment experience they want to offer to their customers.

Guys, describe Ekster Wallets in under 50 words.
Optimizing everyday carry. We try to bring the most efficient solutions to all that we carry with us on a day to day basis.

What were you doing before starting EW?
We were/and some are still studying at Erasmus.

What made you decide to start working on it?
We were not satisfied with the current alternatives on the wallet market, and decided we needed to jump in, in order to create the ultimate wallet.

How did you come up with the name? and why the Magpie bird as a mascotte?
An Ekster is the Dutch name for the Magpie bird, which is a bird that is known to bring valuable items back to its nest. Considering we make trackable wallets, it was a good fit. Also, a bird was in our eyes a good mascotte for the company.

You are introducing a new, fresh and stylish brand – some may think one of many: how have you built customer loyalty?
We give extremely detailed updates and comments on both our crowdfund pages IndieGogo and Kickstarter to keep our customers in the loop at all times. We have noticed that many campaigns tend to slack when they are producing and or showing delays, and therefore we decided to be transparent about everything that is going on in the process. Next to that, we let our backers vote if we want to change a certain feature in our wallet. In this way, they are involved and are more excited about the outcome.

What does a typical day as CEO consist of?
No one occupies the function of CEO (yet), however as founders of a fresh/young company and a small team, we need to have a clear overview of all matters involved. Luckily we get assisted by experts of the industry.
A normal day starts with a cup of coffee, a short 5 min meeting to discuss everyone’s task and goals. After, everyone will go back to their normal range of tasks.

Let’s go in depth: what are your thoughts on the future of your industry?
Slowly, everyday carry will cease to exist, but for another 10+ years, there will be necessary solutions needed for the things we carry with us. However, more and more interesting technologies are created every day which can be implemented to bridge the gap between traditional wallets/every day carry and a total digital (payment/carrying) environment.

What is your favourite app or piece of software that helps you every day?
The best is definitely Slack: to keep a clear overview of all the discussion on different topics – also iotGurus’ pick. But we also recommend: Trello for our to do lists; Teamgantt to keep track of our long-term planning and production timeline; Groove to help you answering emails with our main company email, and never forget Dropbox!

What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?
To promise a delivery date that was only obtainable if everything went right. Now we learned everything will go wrong, so will add more lead time to every delivery date.

What one piece of advice would you give to startup founders?
Try to mimic processes and actions done by bigger companies and tailor it to your own company. They have already passed the first stage for a reason.

What’s the best prank someone has played on you at work?
We have not been pranked yet, but we are not afraid to start a prank war – hear that, ECE Campus? 😉

What key goal have you yet to achieve?
Being in retail.

Where is the value of being located at the ECE Campus?
Having knowledge around you that can help you through problems many startups face everyday. Besides, it is perfect to have all the facilities already in our office, without needing to purchase everything.

And this was all for our latest episode of Glance@theCommunity. Next week meet Erik, CEO of Parhelion!

Interested in keeping in touch with Rick and Olivier and join their ambitions? Then look no further than ece.nl/campus. Do you want to join the ECE Campus community? We are expanding! Let us know by contacting the ECE Team at campus@ece.nl.