Powered by People identifies and onboards brands lacking digital presence, with 40% already on Shopify. The platform finances transactions and curates brands by aesthetic and sales potential, using dropshipping plus financing to help makers enter North American and European wholesale markets without inventory risk.
Chapters
How are you reaching some of these brands that might, you know, might not even have like a digital kind of presence, as you mentioned? And then what does that kind of onboarding process look like?
Yeah, right now, I would say most of the brands that we have, they have to have experience exporting. So we're not necessarily today, I think, achieving this goal of, you know, global access for independent brands. So a lot of them are well established today. They, I would say 40% have a Shopify site. And so we have the ability to integrate with your Shopify, upload your SKUs through our platform. We are working on an integration on an inventory level right now, because I think that'll be a really important part for kind of omnichannel management. What we have found is a lot of brands, they're oftentimes just selling retail, and we're for the first time pushing them into wholesale. So we recognize our platform is actually the first time they are an omnichannel retailer, and that's where our tools actually come in, is if they can use our portal as the single source for integrating with all their other, you know, mobile merchandising, e-commerce, and now wholesale. We see that as kind of the future for our platform as well. But yeah, that said, I mean, Shopify integrations is one. Otherwise, we work with a lot of programs like SheTrades with the UN, a lot of local programs that will effectively do capacity development from, you know, really export readiness to financial sort of cleanliness, business acumen. We will use those as feeder programs for what we're doing, and then we do a high curation on aesthetics? Do we think it will sell? Because ultimately we are financing all these transactions, and pushing a product into the market that's going to get returned or not sold is something that we're a bit— in the early days anyway— a little bit more cautious of. And actually, we found now that with our retailers, dropship is a significant new offering, and I think new growth opportunity. And so a lot of our brands, it's a great way for them to de-risk sale of their current offering into some of the North American and European markets. So we are actually looking at that as a great way to bring on brands that maybe would have not come onto our wholesale platform, but want to start offering our dropship infrastructure and our financing infrastructure as a part of that as well. So yeah, we bring them in, we work through a number of different channels, and right now it's, you know, we hope it pays for itself over time, but I think again, we're just looking for kind of critical mass and to be the source of of this type of product, and we're willing to obviously make the commitment in upskilling this really unique sort of maker community around the world.
