The NovaSupplier Founder Story: Why I Built This at 20 | NovaSupplier
I'm 20, and I Left University to Build the Direct Route Between Fashion Brands and Portuguese Factories
Matias Santos, Founder·
Ovar is a small city on the Portuguese coast, halfway between Porto and Aveiro. If you've heard of it, you're probably in the industry. I grew up here with a family embedded in Portuguese textiles and footwear for generations, on the manufacturing side, the side that makes things and that most people in fashion never see. What I saw growing up was a gap so obvious it was almost embarrassing: Portuguese factories producing garments for recognized European brands, and nobody outside the industry knowing those factories existed. No web presence, no direct access, no way for an independent brand to find them without an agent staying in the middle forever. That gap is why I built NovaSupplier.
What I grew up watching
The Portuguese textile industry is serious. Portugal is the fifth largest textile and clothing exporter in the EU. The factories in the north, Guimarães, Barcelos, Braga, Famalicão, have been producing for European luxury and mid-market brands for decades. They know what they're doing. They produce at a level that competes with anything in Europe.
They are also, almost uniformly, invisible online.
A factory with 120 employees, 35 years of production experience, and a client list that would impress any brand founder might have a website that hasn't been updated since 2014. No Instagram. No LinkedIn presence. An info@ email address that goes to a shared inbox. The knowledge that they're worth working with lives in the heads of agents, in the address books of sourcing directors at large brands, and in word of mouth between people who've been in the industry long enough to know who to call.
This is not an accident. These factories grew up in a world where their business came from relationships and trade shows. They didn't need to market themselves. The agents brought the brands. The brands brought the orders. The system worked, for the factories.
For independent brands trying to enter that system without a decade of industry connections, the experience is different. You search. You find a list of names. You email. You hear nothing. You conclude that Portugal doesn't work for brands at your scale.
That conclusion is wrong. The factories are there. The access isn't.
Why agents exist and why they're also the problem
I want to be fair about this. Agents didn't create the problem I'm describing. They solved a version of it.
Before platforms existed for this, the transaction cost of a brand finding the right Portuguese factory was genuinely high. You needed someone who knew the cluster, knew which factories had capacity for which products at which volumes, and could make an introduction that the factory would take seriously. Agents did that. They reduced a real friction. They earned their place in the supply chain by solving a real problem.
The issue is what the model creates over time.
When an agent sits between a brand and a factory permanently, two things happen. First, the brand never builds a direct relationship with the factory. The factory's loyalty is to the agent who brings them recurring business, not to the brand on whose behalf the agent is working. When the relationship becomes difficult, a failed sample, a delay, a quality issue, the agent is the mediator, not the advocate. Their incentive is to keep both sides happy enough to preserve the commission, not to resolve the problem in the brand's favour.
Second, the brand never learns what the factory actually costs. The agent's margin is built into the quote. The brand sees a number that includes a layer they can't see and can't negotiate. Over years of production, this is not a small amount.
I'm not saying agents are dishonest. I'm saying the structure of the relationship creates misaligned incentives, and those misaligned incentives have real costs for the brands paying them.
Why I left university
I enrolled in university in September 2024 and left after the first semester.
The honest reason: I could see a specific problem in an industry I understood from the inside, I had the technical skills to build something to solve it, and I was certain that sitting in lectures for three more years would not make me better positioned to do it. My family, who know this industry as well as anyone, understood the decision and supported it.
That support was not unconditional. It came with a clear expectation: build something real, not a side project.
Building something real in a marketplace means doing things that don't scale before you build things that do. It means having the conversations yourself, brokering the introductions yourself, managing the problems yourself, before you know what the platform should actually do. I spent the first months talking to factories, every conversation adding something I couldn't have learned from a market research report. And talking to brands, every conversation clarifying what the actual friction was, not the friction I imagined from the outside.
Some of what I found confirmed what I expected. Most of what I found surprised me.
What I learned that I didn't expect
The best factories are not hard to find. They're hard to get.
Every factory in Portugal has a name and an address. Finding the name is not the problem. The problem is that a first-time brand emailing a factory they found on a list is, from the factory's perspective, indistinguishable from the forty other first-time brands that emailed last month and never placed an order. The factory's response to that uncertainty is silence or a one-line reply asking for "more information."
The brands that get responses are the ones that arrive with a complete brief, clear volumes, a realistic delivery date, and a stated budget. Not because those things are magic, but because they signal that the brand understands the process and is actually ready to produce. That signal is rarer than you'd think.
Price is almost never the real obstacle.
Most conversations I've had with brands that were stuck on Portuguese production were not stuck on price. They were stuck on process. They didn't understand CMT versus Full Package, so they were pricing FPP expectations against CMT quotes. They were anchoring to prices from factories in completely different size classes. They were comparing a sample cost to a production cost. The confusion was process, not budget.
When I explained the actual economics, what a setup fee covers, why seamless MOQs are structural rather than negotiable, why an FPP hoodie at 200 units costs what it costs, the response was almost always "nobody explained that to me." That information gap is what I'm closing.
Factories want direct relationships too.
This surprised me most. I expected factories to be comfortable with the agent model because it was familiar. What I found was something different: factories that are tired of being one step removed from the brands they're making things for, tired of the agent as a communication bottleneck, and genuinely interested in a model where the brand relationship is direct and permanent.
The best factory owners I've met are proud of what they produce. They want to know who's wearing it.
What NovaSupplier actually is
NovaSupplier is not a directory. Directories exist. They don't solve the problem.
It is the infrastructure for a brand to find the right Portuguese factory, manage the full relationship, brief, quotes, samples, purchase orders, payments, in one place, and own that relationship directly and permanently. No agent in the middle. No commission layer the brand can't see. No dependency on a third party whose incentives are not aligned with the brand's.
When a brand closes their first production run through NovaSupplier, the factory knows them, they know the factory, and that relationship belongs to both of them. When they place their second order, their third, their tenth, they're building on something real.
That's the thing I wanted to build. The direct route. The infrastructure that the agent model never had to create because agents were the infrastructure.
What I'm certain about and what I'm not
I'm certain that Portuguese manufacturing is undervalued and underutilized by the brands that should be working with it. The quality is there. The capability is there. The flexibility is there for brands that know how to approach it. The access problem is real and solvable.
I'm not certain that every decision I've made in building this is the right one. I'm 20. The platform is early. There are things I'll get wrong and correct, things I've already gotten wrong and corrected, and things I don't know I don't know yet.
What I know from watching this industry my whole life is that the factories in northern Portugal deserve better distribution than they've had. And what I know from building for the past year is that the brands trying to produce in Europe deserve a cleaner route than the one that currently exists.
Those two things are what NovaSupplier is for.
If you're building a brand and you're thinking about Portugal
The thing I'd tell you, having had this conversation more times than I can count: the obstacle is almost never what you think it is.
It's not that Portuguese factories are too expensive. It's that the total cost calculation looks different once you're actually in production.
It's not that they won't work with small brands. It's that they won't work with small brands who approach them as if Portugal is a commodity market.
It's not that you need an agent to access them. It's that you need to arrive with the right brief.
I've built NovaSupplier so that arriving with the right brief is the part we handle together.
If you're sourcing in Portugal, or thinking about it, browse the factory network. If you have a specific project, start a brief. If you want to talk through whether Portugal is right for what you're making, .
I'm Matias. I'm 20, I'm from Ovar, and this is what I'm building.
NovaSupplier connects independent fashion brands directly with vetted Portuguese manufacturers. No agent between you and the factory.