Powered by People is a digital wholesale marketplace connecting independent makers with retailers like West Elm and Crate & Barrel. The platform offers buy-now-pay-later terms for retailers, flexible $3,000 advances for makers, and focuses on small-batch home goods and personal care products with transparent sourcing.
Chapters
I guess it might be helpful to learn a little bit more about, you know, who is Powered by People for on the kind of customer side? And maybe like, what are the specific problems that you're solving for?
Yeah, great question. We, on the buyer side, we position ourselves, Powered by People, as really the first of its kind curated digital wholesale marketplace that focuses on responsibly sourced products and goods. So it has this trusted, vetted platform for buyers, independent retailers, large-scale brands as well. And I can go through our customer list and really connecting them then with differentiated and diverse brands, but also unique exclusive products. And I think those— I want to emphasize that I don't think there's enough conversation around how you differentiate. And we see that our retailers are going to be most successful by differentiating with diversity and one-of-a-kind sort of access. Of course, these are business-to-business wholesale scaled production. They can do tens of thousands of units in a month if they needed. But it is— we encourage kind of small batch, small run, exclusive products. You can switch out a colorway, make it unique to you. But as far as who our retailers are, we also— one of the biggest draws, similarly to what we offer to our makers on our platform, is our business-to-business, or I would say our buy now pay later financing solution, it is a really big value add. And we are generally a little bit of an elevated marketplace right now, just by how we've positioned ourselves kind of launching into the market. So we offer $3,000 of flexible cash advance— or sorry, advance to the makers, but flexible payment sort of model, net 60 payment terms to our buyers as well. And that has been largely and well utilized by a number of them. And again, we, we, our average transaction compared to other platforms is closer to about $1,200 running through our platform right now. So it's a little bit higher than what you'd find across other much more kind of mainstream independent retail. That said, we work with West Elm, The Citizenry, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, Cost Plus World Market, a lot of these that are focused on the sector of home goods, home decor, home accessories. Personal care, gift, and largely are looking at kind of values-based businesses where they can promote story and want a bit more transparency and authenticity to the sourcing of that product. So that's been our positioning kind of to date, and I think we want to maintain kind of authenticity to that narrative as well. We think this is what customers want, and ultimately our retailers will be more successful, we believe, by sourcing through our platform and then just being competitive on the financing and the trust and the guarantees that we can offer them.
