A Bison in business: Ash Modha

Ash Modha lives in the future. It’s a necessity when you compete in the clothing industry at the scale this Winnipegger does.

“I keep saying to our team, ‘We’re paid to be futurists. We’re paid to know what’s going to happen a year from now, two years from now. If we don’t know that fashion cycle or what’s coming up, we’re going to get lapped,’” Modha [BA/98] says from his Mondetta headquarters, not far from the city’s Maples neighbourhood where he spent his teenage years. 

This CEO’s business origin story is a Manitoba favourite. Raised by immigrant parents forced to flee Uganda, Modha with brother Prashant Modha [MBA/91] and friend Raj Bahl [BA/90] grew their startup selling T-shirts at Grand Beach. With their global design (inspired by the German licence plate of a Volkswagen Beetle), their signature flag sweatshirts went viral long before social media. 

Some highlights of Mondetta’s evolution in the four decades since? A well-timed pivot into athleisure wear, partnerships with 55 factories in 14 countries, annual revenue in the multiple nine figures, and a reputation for being a standout in sustainable practices.

UM Chancellor Dave Angus sat down with Modha for this latest installment of Bisons in Business, a series showcasing alumni who are leaders in their field. 

Chancellor Dave Angus:

Where did you get the entrepreneurial bug?

Ash Modha:

I was always into selling things. My brothers would give me notepads and say, “Go sell these.” I’d go around the neighbourhood when I was eight, nine years old. And then in Grade 6, I took pictures of the school play. My uncle and mom worked for Sooter’s [Photography]. I’d take pictures of all the kids, put them on a big cardboard sheet, and then look to sell the pictures to the kids for a buck. I was working for my mom at Sooter’s. She was very tough on us. She made us work harder than anybody else. 

What led you to the University of Manitoba? 

I said to my parents in 1986, “I am going to start a business and I’m not going to go to school.” And they went, “Absolutely not.” At that time, you didn’t become an entrepreneur. They were like, “No, you’re going to be a doctor, lawyer, dentist. Those are the real professions. What is this pipe dream of selling clothes and stuff? That’s not going to fly.” Eventually they said, “You can do this but you have to go to university.” I went into economics and I got my minor in poli-sci and business.

What do you leverage today from your university education?

To be a critical thinker. University allows you to form your own opinion and make sure you’re getting the right information to form that opinion. That’s what’s missing today with social media and all this garbage that’s out there.

Getting a university education is going to be more critical as we move forward with AI and all these instruments that are going to lessen the ability to think, right? It’s more important than ever.

I was in Palo Alto [in Silicon Valley] just a few months ago and they were saying the whole idea of school and universities is going to shift in the next decade. It’s going to be something we’ve never seen before. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but they’re saying the whole concept of a classroom will be so different. It’ll be about having those soft skills of leadership and being able to stand in front of a group and speak. It’s not going to be about writing an essay. It’s going to shift and change so fast.

What kind of student were you?

I basically spent my time working on the business. But when it came to studying, I would spend all my time at the University. That comes from not wanting to let my parents down. You want to make sure you’re there and you’re getting the right education and you’re going to do the right things. But then, believe it or not, I didn’t graduate on time. I was one credit less because the business just took off. It went from $50,000 in sales to $3 million to $10 million. I was 21 and traveling to India, to China, everywhere around the world. 

I went back in 1996 and finished it. You start something, you finish it.

What’s your relationship like now with UM?

It’s big. It’s important for us as a business community to be involved in the universities. To push higher learning and make sure people understand you don’t have to go there and become a doctor, become the best student—not everybody’s going to be in that situation. But the skillset you’ll get at university is so important. We become lemmings just following ridiculous news and listening to silliness and that has to stop.

We have to do an even better job of making sure that [youth] come out of K to 12 with an ability to go to university and graduate. That’s a scary situation we face today that we are not actually looking at. If you want to compete against China and India and all those places, we’re going to have to become a lot more critical with our education system.

Are there things UM could do to have a tighter relationship with industry?

The University is doing a very good job. There has to be more meaningful consultation on certain issues, but I do think UM works well with government and with private enterprise to make sure they’re dealing with these things. For example, on the engineering side, if you look at what Gerry Price [BSc(ME)/70, MSc/72, LLD/2017] has done, which is just fantastic. He’s pushing the University to make sure they have a world-class engineering department. We have to keep thinking that way. Because if we don’t, we’re going to get left behind. We’re going to fall behind to Waterloo. He’s saying: if you want us to hire graduates of the University, you have to make sure they’re at that level. 

Even the I.H. Asper School of Business—they’ve done a great job. I’m heavily involved in the International Distinguished Entrepreneur Award dinner. To be able to bring in global leaders of that scale, that’s so important. When they come here, they’re blown away by the University, the business community and the government, how we’re all interconnected and how we all work with each other. 

In 2011, when Jim Sinegal, [co-founder of Costco], came here, I remember him saying to me, “The business community here is so attached to the business school.” So he tried to do that same thing when he went back to Seattle. And it didn’t work because it’s just so fragmented. But here we’re so tight and it’s pretty remarkable. 

When you look at your business, what problem do you see Mondetta helping to solve?

We’re spending a lot of time on environmental aspects of our business, and how do we lead? And how we do the right things? We’ve embarked on full-scale supply chain mapping. By 2028, we’ll have mapped the entire supply chain, every rivet, every button, everything we use in the input of an item. I don’t think there’s another Canadian company doing something like this. It tells us where the materials are coming from to make sure they’re not coming from forced-labour areas. It gives you a full understanding of the product because so many people say it’s recycled, but it’s actually not—they’re using virgin materials and just greenwashing [when companies market themselves as more sustainable than they actually are].

We’re even going a step further now: at the end cycle of a product, what happens to it? We’re ahead of the European standards, which are being launched in 2027, and that is a huge advantage for us.

Maybe it’s hard for us to compete against New York or LA when it comes to cool, because they’ve got the Kardashians a step away, and they can come in and pick up an item and put it on. But where we can crush those companies is supply chain and business excellence. If we run a great business, everything else will follow itself. 

Of the 26 companies that we were competing against for shelf space in the stores in 1990, there are only two around today: Polo Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. But we’ve constantly pivoted, changed our business, continued to look at where the markets are going and driving our business forward, 40 years later.

Mondetta is certainly a higher-purpose company. 

When we first considered: how do you map greenhouse gas emissions for a company that makes product everywhere? How do you do all that? This is going to be a daunting task. So, let’s start with something small. How much paper do we print? It started like that and we printed a million pieces of paper a year out of this office. Okay, why don’t we just change that? Let’s cut it down by 10 per cent a year. Within three years, we were down to 200,000 and now we print less than 10,000 sheets.

In 2020 we started mapping our greenhouse emissions and today we spend millions of dollars a year on the environmental side of our business and compliance. It’s a big number. We could put that money in our pocket and walk away and not do it because 99 per cent of our competitors don’t, but we think it’s the right thing to do.