impact trade - impact as a service for brands and marketplaces

Transforming brands and consumers into impact investors through their online purchases.

Executive Summary

Accelerated drastically by events over the past three months, new generations of consumers want to buy products that create deep, transparent impact that reflect their values. Brands that offer these products are rewarded with more loyal customers that spend more, more frequently.

Brands are struggling to do this. Building an in-house ethical product model is an expensive focus-drain and comes at the cost of using those resources to invest in product or growth.

We want to transform every dollar spent online into impact by making it effortless for brands to become ethical brands. No changes to their operations or product, no additional spend - just a seamless integration with their existing e-commerce channels in concert with our impct.com platform.

We call this impact trade - the transformation of brands and their customers into impact investors through their purchases.

How does it work? We manage the investment (not donation) of a percentage of brand's sale to a customer into curated, high impact projects worldwide targeted by the customer themselves. The brand gets repaid their capital, the customer gets the return on investment in credit to spend with the brand in the future. Think of this like Affirm for impact.

Problem

Brands are struggling to build compelling products for a new generation of consumer that want to use what they buy to signal their values. Why?

Every dollar a brand invests in having their product do good comes at the expense of building a better product, a cheaper product, or scaling their sales. The focus split from in-housing impact is devastating to growth and explains the relatively small impact of ethical products to date.

Put simply? When brands in-house impact there's no way to simultaneously meet all consumer demands and build a truly compelling ethical product.

a consumer's ideal ethical product

does the kind of good
they really care about

creates
deep impact

transparency into good done

a class-leading
product

better
value

a pre-determined cause the brand cares about

a token donation to the cause

impact is
opaque

brands are instead investing in impact

a more expensive
product

what today's ethical brands deliver

Solution

The solution here is to decouple brand and impact and build a universal way for any brand to empower their customers to do real, targeted good through their purchases.

This is what we've built. Our impact trade platform offers brands (or marketplaces) a way to outsource impact and bake it into their digital sales channel(s) rather than in-house it as an ethical product model.

What does this mean? Brands can focus 100% of their time and resources on product while we enable their consumers to create unparalleled impact

Market

It's hard to understate the growing demand for impact products.

50% of all growth in CPG in the USA over the last seven years was driven by sustainability-marketed products and these grew 5.6X faster than their non-standard equivalents (NYU Stern).

Over one billion dollars of Fair Trade coffee was sold last year in the USA. Sustainability-labeled CPG in general?

$114B USD

For Brands

+AOV

+retention

+NPS

Impact Trade through impct.com

We private-label or co-brand to bring consumers (individual and enterprise) exclusive versions of the things they consume most, starting with our coffee brand impctcoffee.

Consumers earn credit (a percentage of gross margin) on any purchases through impct.com.

That credit can be "invested" into thousands of high impact projects (from environment, to education, to agriculture) worldwide on our impct.com platform through our global network of partners like Kiva and UNICEF.

Those partners repay investments with interest back to us and provide updates and impact data back to consumers, giving them true transparency into the good they've done through their purchases.

For individuals this is the things you love transparently doing exactly the kind of good you care about. For the enterprise this is effectively transforming office CPG spend into bespoke impact that plugs directly into their CSR programs.

Milestones

Raised $250K pre-seed from local angels
September 2018

Launched first product, impctcoffee, in Bay Area
January 2019

Onboarded Uber, Salesforce, Adobe, Thumbtack as enterprise clients
March-August 2019

Participated in Pear VC Summer accelerator
Summer 2019

Cisco opened an impctcoffee cafe on campus
September 2019

Closed 2019 with $250,000 in sales
December 2019

Closed new $500K ARR deal with Uber to power their Mission Bay HQ starting June
February 2020

Launched new DTC impct.com platform to $10,000 sales in first month
March 2020

Negotiating expanded deals with Salesforce and Cisco for $2M+ ARR
May 2020

 

Growth Strategy

Customer acquisition and retention are a platform's biggest challenges. We address these with a unique B2B2C-like model.

For companies impact trade represents the ability to painlessly transform their office snack and beverage programs into impact that plugs into their CSR programs. Our corporate wholesale program brings our brands (like impctcoffee@Cisco San Jose to the right) into the channels where our target consumer spends most of their time. Put simply? Companies pay us to market our platform to their employees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do you mean by "invest"?

Rather that donating away margin we use low-interest rate loans invested into impact projects through a global network of MFIs (micro-finance institutions) and social enterprises. Those loans typically carry a 1-2 year repayment term. Capital repayment + interest means that not only is creating impact not a cost to our company, it actually fuels its growth in a virtuous cycle. You can think of us as building a new kind of impact investment fund through product sales rather than LPs.

How do you handle distribution?

We strongly believe that the disintermediation of brand and distribution is one of our strongest competitive advantages and enables our model. Our platform being the sole source of impact trade products means a perfectly exclusive portfolio versus other platforms/distributors and the built-in ability to feed all purchases into our impact targeting system.

 

Team

B.A. Honors, Logic - B.Sc., Quant Finance - MBA

$1,000,000 Hult Prize winner for world's most disruptive new social enterprise

Taylor Scobbie (taylor@impct.com)
Founder + CEO

B.A. - MBA

$1,000,000 Hult Prize winner for world's most disruptive new social enterprise

Jessi Fu
Founder + COO

MBA Candidate - Harvard Business School

Blackrock, Deutsch Bank,
Chicago Pacific Founders

Mindy Huynh
Chief of Staff

BSc, Comp Sci - MSc, Information Sciences

Previously Senior Engineer @ Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, Yahoo

ShihChi Huang
VP Technology

Venture-backed founder @ Whodini

SVP+ @ Legato, Declara,
Centrify, LaunchPad

Jim Chappell
Board of Directors

Partner @ Sound Ventures

VP @ Softbank-backed
PlaySight Interactive

Jonnie Cox
Strategy + Fundraising

COO @ EMC, VP @ Capgemini

Chief of Staff @ The Linux Foundation, Chairwoman @ National Diversity Council

Sheryl Chamberlain
Boarf of Advisors

Raise

We're raising a seed round of $3,000,000 to expand our platform development team, build out our product portfolio to service existing demand, and expand our geographic reach.