impact trade

Building a future where everything you buy online
does exactly the kind of good you want.

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, whether they sell software subscriptions or coffee, 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.

Gone are the days brands have to donate to create impact. 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 margin, the customer gets the return on investment in credit to spend with the brand in the future. Think of this like Affirm for impact.

milestones

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

Launched beta impact trade product, impctcoffee, in Bay Area
January 2019

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

Participated in Pear VC Summer accelerator
Summer 2019

Cisco opened an impact trade cafe on campus
September 2019

Closed 2019 with $250,000 in revenue @ 40% MoM growth
December 2019 

Hired new CTO to develop our new impct.com platform + ecommerce integrations to empower any brand with our impact trade model
May 2020

problem

Despite massive consumer demand, brands are struggling to build compelling
(and competitive) products that do good.

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.

Consumers want to do the kind of good they care about.

but

Brands have already chosen a cause they care about

Consumers want a class-leading product

but

Brands are instead investing valuable resources into doing good

Consumers want to create deep, transparent impact

but

Brands instead make opaque, low impact donations.

Consumers want better value

but

Brands are being forced to price impact in, raising prices

solution

Our solution 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.

Our impact trade platform and e-commerce channel integration are built to offer 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. We allow brands to impact invest out of the margin on sale targeted by the purchasing consumer.

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 size

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 ethical products and these grew 5.6X faster than their non-standard equivalents (NYU Stern).

 

 

 

$435B USD

ethical products - USA

stage one
impct.com

We're rolling out our impact trade service in two stages. To introduce consumers to the impact trade concept while we build out our backend features we're building a highly curated and limited end-to-end experience on our impct.com platform. Consumers can:

  • purchase impact trade products from select brand partners through a built-in marketplace
  • earn and target investable credits to create impact
  • engage with other platform users around impact created.

Order fulfillment and distribution will be handled through partner brand's existing processes.

Given that partner brands will be accessing a totally new audience through our native platform we've priced this slightly lower than what a brand would typically pay through a marketplace.

stage two
ecommerce integration

Ultimately our goal is to build a set of integrations across ecommerce platforms (Shopify, woocommerce, an in-house API) that will bring impact trade to the native e-commerce experiences of the world's biggest brands and marketplaces.

Via an impact trade integration a consumer will be given a choice (or, at the brand's discretion, made default) at checkout to "make this product impact trade". Doing so will allow us to capture some of the margin for investment, crediting that user with the same amount on our impct.com platform for targeting.

As the investment is made and paid back the brand will re-capture their margin, the consumer the upside in credits to spend with the brand, and the brand valuable behavioral data about that consumer.

pricing (of final sale value)
25% fee
25% reinvested + repaid

pricing (of final sale value)
5% fee
25% reinvested + repaid

team

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

B.A. Honors, Logic - University of Calgary, Canada
B.Sc., Quant Finance - University of Calgary, Canada
MBA - NCCU, Taiwan

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

Jessi Fu
Founder + COO

B.A, Philosophy - Fu Jen University, Taiwan
MBA - NCCU, Taiwan

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

Mindy Huynh
Chief of Staff

BSc, Business Administration - UC Berkeley
BA, Economics - NTU, Taiwan
MBA Candidate - Harvard Business School

Blackrock, Deutsch Bank,
Chicago Pacific Founders

Trent Ratzlaff
CTO

BEng, Electrical - University of Calgary, Canada
MSc, Sustainability Energy Tech - TU Delft, Netherlands 

Jim Chappell
Board of Directors

SVP+ @ Legato, Declara,
Centrify, LaunchPad

 

Jonnie Cox
Advisor - Strategy + Fundraising

Partner @ Sound Ventures

VP @ Softbank-backed
PlaySight Interactive

 

Sheryl Chamberlain
Advisor - Partnerships

COO @ EMC
VP @ Capgemini
Chief of Staff @ The Linux Foundation
Chairwoman @ National Diversity Council