We started Ethical Ocean because we think we can transform an entire market, deliver social impact, have a lot of fun in the process, and maybe, just maybe, even get a little rich.
As co-founder and CEO, I’m fully invested in this company. Our thesis is that people want to feel good about what they buy – consuming products that are safe and healthy for their families, that weren’t manufactured in sweatshops, and that have as little negative environmental impact as possible.
Shopping ethically here in Canada is still hard to do, and is relatively expensive. This isn’t the case everywhere, however. While in school, I spent a year in bustling London, U.K. There, the market for ethical shopping is mature and has reached the mainstream.
I knew that people weren’t any less caring, kind, or conscientious here in Canada – it’s just that Fair Trade, organic, and natural products hadn’t been marketed as mainstream. Instead, they were portrayed as, well, “hippie.” I assumed it would just be a matter of time before a shift in perception happened at home, but realized that business could help to accelerate it.
So, in 2010, we set out on a mission of massive proportions: to consolidate an entire market segment, thereby making Ethical Ocean the only online destination for eco-friendly, Fair Trade, and organic shopping for Canadian consumers.
Sure enough, traffic and sales began to trickle in. A lot of people told us that we had created just the thing they had been looking for. Slowly, we began to get noticed.
Then, in March of last year, three events converged in a single week. First, we closed a seed investment round of $500,000 from a group of angels. Second, we had four minutes of fame as the final company in the season finale of Dragons’ Den, in one of the most dramatic segments of the season. Third, we launched in the U.S., starting to spend some of our investment on advertising south of the border.
Seemingly overnight, we were flooded with success. We were growing fast. It was exciting, and it reaffirmed that we were onto something. This was our chance to have a mark on the way people shop en masse. So, we started focusing on growth above all else. After all, more people buying products that do good was surely better for everyone. Or was it?
In our haste, we made some decisions that were not always in the best interest of building a healthy, long-lasting business, and thereby ran contrary to our vision of transforming ethical shopping.
Assuming that we needed greater selection in order to satisfy more customers, we had been on an aggressive recruitment drive to attract more brands to sell on Ethical Ocean. In doing so, however, we let our previously high standards slide. The result was a bloated catalogue in which quality was inconsistent, and thus unreliable.
Our user experience also began to diminish, as there were too many products to sort through, and our user interface became clumsy.
So, at the end of 2011, while we were proud of the growth we had achieved (50-per-cent growth every month in the past year), we were left feeling uneasy with some of the decisions we had made along the way.
This wasn’t the business we had wanted to build. We weren’t creating the empowering and consistently high-quality experience we wanted our customers to associate with shopping ethically. Nor was growth for the sake of growth the reason that our team had started Ethical Ocean and invested so many tireless hours in it.
Our team struck a New Year’s resolution to return to our roots. Overnight, we cut 200 brands from our catalogue, deleting any products we wouldn’t personally recommend. We re-launched our site, with ethics and quality at the core of the user experience and influencing our selection of each and every product we sell. We then became a B Corp to anchor us in what matters most in this business – growth for impact’s sake.
Now, more than a year after that month when everything seemed to come together, Ethical Ocean is a far stronger company. We understand that delivering products that are exceptional both in their quality and in the way that they were made is what will lead to a success that is true to our mission.
Original Article
Source: the mark news
Author: Chad Hamre
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