Jakub Chmielniak
Meet our CEO, thanks to him Lethe is able to make the biggest projects come alive.
Bio
His name is Jakub Chmielniak. He created Mr. Gugu & Miss Go. He also launched several other brands and startups. Join him and create wonderful things together!
Jakub Chmielniak is a young Polish entrepreneur, who proved over a very short period of time that all you need to achieve global success is passion, commitment, and perseverance. He created such brands and projects as Mr. Gugu & Miss Go, Live Heroes, or Carpatree, he doesn’t rest on his laurels and he is planning to surprise the market over the next few years with more innovative ideas – not only on clothes, but also on technological innovations, business social responsibility, environmental care, and levelling social inequalities.
In Polish and foreign media, he is portrayed as an artistic soul, a man whose clothes are worn by hipsters all over the world and, at the same time, as an efficient businessman, who wants to make his dreams come true by helping young people to achieve their goals.
What others say about him?
dr Pawel Armada
I know Jakub Chmielniak as one of few examples of complete dedication to self-improvement which also marks an invincible service to others. All this can be said on the basis of my experience as a university teacher in Krakow, Poland. Since I began lecturing in 2006, I have met a large number of people as young as ambitious and, perhaps, should admit that I am a lucky person with regard to my students. However, against this generally promising background, Jakub's personality must be described as brilliant and unexpected. He joined my course in history of philosophy (more precisely, it was history of ethics) by the end of 2007 and very soon was I overwhelmed, first, by his capacity to learn (and the more I knew of him the more I was astounded with the range of his gifts as simply never before had I met so versatile a man!), yet secondly - and this I find crucial - by his insatiable, though still well-balanced, desire for knowledge, new experience, fresh thinking. Moreover, he proved to be a tireless, all the more responsible, organizer of many scholarly events through the next four years. Due recognition must be given to the fact that he always focused on work with his fellow students, probably less gifted and thus taking advantage of his leadership. This was the lesson of hierarchy that offended no one. At university, as well as in business, we are in need of people of character. I also was close to Jakub at the very beginning of his business career. We discussed the pros and cons of his choice to leave academia in order to gain as much independence as possible for chasing dreams. And, needless to say, Jakub's dreams remained in accordance with his intellectual pursuits. If you want to have better world, and discover yourself to be able to share your gifts on a tremendous scale, you are ready to work on the means of improvement. For him, to be sure, any amount of money he has since earned is only a brick in the building of common future. No covetousness, no avarice at all. But will to grow, in a right sense, and help other people on various levels. Indeed, he runs a lot of different projects. They seem to be innovative and quite relevant to the present day and, as such, comprehensible not mainly in terms of making money. Being now a proficient entrepreneur, he pays much attention to the so-called corporate social responsibility while working with his local community's members, or the company staff in general, and at the same time he boldly undertakes global initiatives. Right at the moment, after launching his latest projects, that is the net platforms for artists and amateur sport clubs, Jakub works on disrupting fashion industry with introduction of the new service: made-to-measure high-quality clothes or, speaking bluntly: your own tailor, available for everyone, and manufactured locally, accessible through a simple app that will let you design them by your own. As none of his previous projects had done much competition before he introduced them to a big audience, we can expect a similar successful path in this case. To be honest, I have no doubt that Jakub's achievements will be noted and appreciated in many ways by a growing number of people in coming years.
Dariusz Bartula
Being his partner in business for a couple of years now, I always think of Jakub as an energetic and truly ambitious person, who can overcome every obstacle to reach his goals. A the same time, he is a good friend of mine and one giving support to many people around. We made friends when he was still studying at the university, and soon after we started to work together. It's just easy to get eager to carry on any tasks with him, as although he's always very emotional about what he aims at, his thoughts always remain clear. Through the last three or so years, Jakub managed to run and put into motion lots of different ideas, all of them concerning those crucial areas like manufacturing, distribution, advertising, services and fashion. His latest ideas are mostly related to highly-customized fashion merchandise which eventually will help him to face the problem of cheap labour in fashion sector in Asia. All who know him are very well aware that he finds the current state of things morally unacceptable. Technically, this is about introducing some new solutions for creation of local products. Not only the size of the product but also its form will be fully suited to meet individual clients' demands. This way, to the advantage of small producers, quality and not quantity comes first. Not to mention the simple fact that our producers can be paid more if the client is focused upon a special kind of product that fulfills their special claims. And the real disappearance of agents between the client and the local producer the means, of course, more equality and fairness in profit sharing. Jakub is a fountainhead of ideas. I have never seen my friend pushing forward with anything that other people had already invented. When he uses an idea which was already there, he does it only in order to change it completely. He is radical in a way. His ideas are far-reaching and so difficult to compare. The innovation he has in mind must be judged broadly enough. It may cause some fundamental change for the fashion industry as a whole. Possible results, insofar as we can make predictions about economic behaviour, look promising, especially for the producers and - that's the final point - for the people who are employed in many small factories in Asia. Jakub is a visionary, however, with no tendency to naivety. He always tackles problems from different angles. If he's succsessful with his current bunch of ideas and simply goes on with all he has invented and scribbled down into his famous notebook, I am very much sure of the world's positive reaction. It seems to me, in the end, that I take part in making an introduction for this.