Nawtee but nice online fundraising
Howard Lake | 11 November 2005 | News
Four friends have said knickers to online fundraising by setting up Nawtee Knickers to sell sensual lingerie online to raise funds for Cancer Research UK.
All four friends had personal experiences of cancer, and decided that setting up a sensual lingerie business online would be an unusual way of raising funds and bringing cancer awareness to young people.
One of the founders, Verbita Kournikova, said: “We wanted to do something different, we all decided lingerie would hit the spot, especially using the Internet as a sales tool, but we could never have imagined it would have proved so popular nor could we have imagined the difficulties we would face setting up the site.”
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Choosing a name for the business posed problems given the tendency for spam filters to block out certain words. “Occasionally we found some blogs and bulletin boards had blocked the word ‘knickers’ making it hard to get our message across,” explained Richard Scorer, Technical Engineer. “But we soon got Internet companies on our side, helping and supporting our cause.”
Most customers using the site are men buying for their partners. The company plans to expand its range after Christmas by adding a men’s section and a range of romantic gifts in time for Valentine’s Day.
The company says that all profits on items sold will be paid to Cancer Research UK Trading Ltd, which gives its taxable profits to Cancer Research UK.
In addition the company has also set up on online donations page using Justgiving.com to generate further income for Cancer Research UK.
On 14 November the friends are launching an additional site to sell to the USA and Canada. It will raise funds for cancer research with the US.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.