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Interview with Chris Bristow and Harvey Jones, Founders of Smartly Green
Smartlygreen.com is an innovative shopping portal/loyalty program/social network that allows people to offset their carbon footprint for free while they shop online at 400+ top retail stores. The site serves customers in the US (with stores in the US including the Gap, Apple, Orbitz, Macys, etc), the UK, and Australia. The two founders of Smartly Green, based in the UK, share the story behind the founding of the site and their vision for its growth.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The Smartly Green story of two “normal guys” (actually with extensive business experience) making a choice to give back through their business
- How they were able to enroll so many top retail brands in their program
- The thinking behind Smartly Green’s international expansion
- Does Smartly Green encourage people to do more shopping? The founders address this question
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Hello, this is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators and I am here with the two founders of Smartly Green. Why don’t you introduce yourselves and tell us what Smartly Green does.
HARVEY JONES: My name is Harvey Jones.
CHRIS BRISTOW: And my name is Chris Bristow.
HARVEY JONES: First of all, Chris and I thought we needed to do something which was environmentally sustainable and living in that way. Because we had spent the last 25 years working for large corporates in different parts of the world and it was now time to put something back in. We came up with the idea from looking at a series of studies that had been in the UK that indicated that in between 70 and 75% of the population actually did have an environmental conscience, but were doing nothing about it. They were doing nothing about it because (a), they found the information confusing or worse, they were actually finding the information coming downstream contradictory. That was a major issue. That resulted in them doing absolutely nothing. We came up with the idea saying, okay let’s do something for that part of society. Let’s make it easy for them and let’s start them on the journey to a more sustainable lifestyle. And let’s make it in such a way that they don’t even have to think about it. They don’t have to change their lifestyles to begin with and they certainly don’t have to spend any more money.
We came up with a retail portal called Smartly Green and people are encouraged to do their normal shopping through us, not to spend any more money and certainly not to do anymore shopping.
Just do their normal shopping through us online. As they shopped through us we earn commissions from the merchants. That commission goes towards a donation on behalf of the individual to a charity. The charity is called Pure - The Clean Planet Trust. It sits on the carbon exchange in London. In effect, it is buying carbon credits off of the exchange. Directly off of the exchange. And in terms of carbon offsets is that they do represent the high ground and it was recently indicated that they tick off all ten of ten boxes laid down by an organization called Carbon Catalogue.org. Uniquely so in the world. That is the proposition. People shop through us by coming on our site. They register and that process indicates to them their carbon profile. The carbon footprint of their household. Once they understand the carbon cost of their lifestyle, we then start them on the journey with shopping through us. We are making increasing amounts of donations on their behalf, so they are becoming more and more aware of what is happening and the carbon costs of items that they are buying.
We then start them on the journey and gradually introduce them to more green services, environmentally friendly products and ethical financial products. That starts them on this path and that is encouraged by the fact that we have a social network component of the site. On that social network we try and encourage people to exchange experiences. Shops they have used, services that they have bought or financial products that they have bought and share those that are good and the bad and come up with other tips. We are trying to create the community and encourage people when we see ourselves as the first step to this branch of society that is currently doing nothing. Our opinion is that unless we engage the hearts and minds of this part of the population then the journey to sustainable living is going to be very long or maybe too late and we have to do that.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: When I was browsing your site last week, one of the first things I saw was that there is a list of retailers that your visitors can shop through so could you explain a little bit about how that works?
HARVEY JONES: Of course. We have in excess of 400 retailers. In the first instance we’ve identified those retailers that people use as part of their everyday lifestyle, their everyday shopping. They range from all the high street names that you would find, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis and so on. The stores that you would use, you would probably do an online transaction with anyways so BT, cell phone provider Vodaphone, bSkyb satellite provider, and so on. The idea is that we are providing these stores and hopefully providing them with service which does not detract in anyway from the way they are currently shopping. That was the original philosophy in getting those stores on board.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Let’s take the example of John Lewis [a British department store chain]. If a user of your site is interested in shopping at John Lewis through your site, how do they do that?
HARVEY JONES: They come on our site. They register on our site and they click on the John Lewis icon. That takes them directly through to the store. We don’t get involved in any financial transactions they have with John Lewis whatsoever. We don’t get involved in any part of their transaction. We don’t see any part of their credit card details. That is really important for us. They go through to John Lewis and do their shopping and then the following day we get a data feed which indicates to us who has bought, the individual who has spent the money and how much they had spent. Then we get an indication of the commission that has been earned.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: The way that I understand it is when someone travels from your site to John Lewis and they make a purchase at John Lewis, John Lewis keeps track of the fact that the visitor came through your site.
HARVEY JONES: Sure.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: And then after visitor makes a purchase they pay a commission to Smartly Green.
HARVEY JONES: Yes, they do. That is exactly what happens, but it is not direct. Our relationship with all the merchants is through a set of affiliate marketing companies. Our data feeds come from affiliate marketing companies and they get those data feeds from the merchant and the commission comes in that way as well.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What do you do with that commission?
HARVEY JONES: Right, we put that commission, part of it goes towards covering our overheads. Then part of it is put into a loyalty pot for the individual. The current proposition is that 80 percent of that loyalty pot is deposited and donated to Pure on the individual’s behalf. Twenty percent goes in the form of cash back to the individual, but they can’t get the cash until they met have that carbon footprint, until they have offset enough or they have donated enough to offset their carbon footprint. At that stage, they get their cash. To be perfectly honest we are rethinking the cash back component because we are not sure we need it. The idea was to put it up there to encourage people to keep coming back and shop through us. The sort of people that we are attracting, our target audience are those that are coming on because they genuinely want to do something about it. They have demonstrated a commitment behavior and will go through a shopping pattern which indicates that they are really buying into the whole proposition. One example of that is an individual that we know who started off by buying a freezer through John Lewis, and then sat down and looked at the results of that in terms of her donation to Pure and then started looking at her whole lifestyle and thought well every month I get in my car and drive 10 miles to buy my contact lenses. Why do I do that? So, she now buys her contact lenses online through Smartly Green. She then looked at other things that were happening in the household and discovered that her husband who was supporting a soccer team in the North of England was going up there every month to the home games and she now buys his train tickets through Smartly Green. Then she realized that another regular purchase was her vitamin tablets, so she now buys her vitamin tablets through Smartly Green. What we have is a collection of spending patterns which were already taking place, but are now done through Smartly Green.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: If I understand correctly, her motivation now for making these purchases through Smartly Green is that these purchases have their carbon emissions offset.
HARVEY JONES: Yes. The donation going towards Pure, which gives her a real feel good factor and secondly she actually sees her carbon footprint being offset. That is not where it ends. We then introduce her to alternative products and services.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: How does Pure do its carbon offsets?
HARVEY JONES: Pure sits on the carbon exchange in London and buys them directly off the exchange. Pure was created because people were approaching the carbon exchange wanting to buy 1 or 10 tons of carbon and of course the exchange is geared to be trading in thousands of tons of carbon. That is how it started. It was set up as a charity to enable individuals to go to the source and buy what are Kyoto compliant gold standard Defra approved carbon credits.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: You gave the example of the freezer that one of your customers bought through John Lewis. How many carbon credits or how much carbon offset would that purchase generate?
HARVEY JONES: The commissions that we get vary enormously. The lowest being maybe Apple iTunes download to something maybe from a niche boutique type of clothing store. On average it is something like half a ton for 500 pounds spent, on average. We really find it difficult coming up with precise figures because they do vary a lot as a function of the commissions that we get. On average, it is for every 500 pounds spent, half a ton is generated in terms of the equivalent donation to Pure.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Is that enough to offset the carbon emissions of that 500 pounds worth of purchases?
HARVEY JONES: Again, we don’t have a direct relationship. We don’t have intimate knowledge of what they are buying. What we have is how much they have spent rather than the article that they are buying. Because it contributes all sort of data protection issues if we have too much understanding and knowledge of what they are buying. We don’t always know.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Is there some sort of standard metric that says if the consumer spends 100 pounds, then there is an average amount of carbon emissions from typical consumer purchases.
HARVEY JONES: I am sure there is and that is something that we are working on at the moment. We don’t have that figure to hand, it is something to which we are doing and is important. The other thing that we are finding is our customers are wanting to know the precise carbon cost of manufacture of things that they are buying. We are looking at stores and have asked them to do so. To our knowledge there are very few who do that. An exception would be Timberland. Timberland actually puts the carbon cost of manufacture on the sides of their packaging, but we recently had meetings with manufacturers who explained to us that they are not doing it, but they are about to. Tesco has just explained for instance that they just put the carbon cost of manufacture of 20 of their items, but Tesco being the large supermarket they are has 20 items out of an inventory of millions of items. We will have to take that into perspective.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: I have noticed that the site has both a U.S. and a U.K. version. What are the benefits and what are the challenges in having sites targeting two different countries?
CHRIS BRISTOW: The benefit is that it is a global problem and the more information that the global communities can share and help to tackle it. The more easily people are going to adopt these tips and tricks and new strategies to their lifestyle. We think it is going to encourage people to get involved. The challenge is that the different countries are at different stages of understanding of climate change and what they are prepared to do to change their lifestyles. It is also very important that any nation facing website has local content that engages the local population. We have a couple of challenges in approaching it. We felt that the U.S. was moving quickly into catching up to what we think the lead that has been taken by Europe in tackling climate change at a personal lifestyle level. We see certainly in parts of the U.S. like California and the West Coast that they are adopting a more green approach very quickly. We thought it was a good time to do it. The sooner we can get a global audience engaged the better for everybody.
HARVEY JONES: Chris is absolutely right. We are trying to create a community and that community considering national boundaries. As further evidence, we have now recently been approached by somebody in Australia to actually roll the product out to an Australian audience. They are currently involved in an affinity scheme in Australia. The likelihood is that we would be rolling out to Australia next.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: How did you select the retailers that you have on the site? I notice that Amazon is absent from the list.
CHRIS BRISTOW: It is a question that we often get, because many people think that we should be vetting the stores for their greenness. As Harvey mention earlier, our approach has been that we wanted to have stores that people are currently using today. The initial benefit they are going to get is maintaining their existing lifestyle, maintaining their existing purchasing habits, but get a nice, green reward from it. We wanted to make sure that all of those stores were available. We also did go out of our way to pick as many green stores as possible to encourage them to start looking at green alternatives. Because of the way the system works and tracking purchases through to the store, not all stores have that capability. Amazon does have a capability of some form of tracking, but it doesn’t fit in with our current architecture. We are working on that and it is a common request, Amazon being such a popular choice for pretty much everything nowadays.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What are some of the green retailers that you have on the site right now?
HARVEY JONES: They include U.K. stores like Adili which is a leading edge fashion store ethically sourced, but leading edge design, Nigel’s Eco-Store, Ethical Superstore and stores like that. Other mainstream organizations and mainstream manufacturers and retail are increasingly coming out with green products and are approaching us. Some U.S. and some European-based, some in mainstream consumer products and some that we just haven’t anticipated approaching us. We are now getting approached by some organizations wishing to be on there. We are also getting approaches from small startup ethical stores wanting to be associated with our site. We are now developing a way in which we can include them.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What kind of marketing and PR are you doing to attract customers to your site?
HARVEY JONES: We have tried many aspects. We have used PR. We had a PR company which we used for a number of months in 2007. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they worked very hard, they were getting us good PR and good profile in the trade press, particularly in the media marketing press, but not necessarily in the mainstream press. The difficulty that they found was that we were falling between a number of stalls within the mainstream press. We were not exactly retail, we were not exactly business and they found difficulties. Since then, Chris and I have been spending a large part of our time on the phone speaking to people. For instance this week we secured an interview with a leading women’s magazine. We had a discussion on Saturday with a journalist from Radio-4. We are finding that we can gauge and track ourselves because we can evangelize the message probably better than a third-party PR company. We have used some off the page advertising. We have done some contextual advertising. We are about to undertake a strategy with the BBC in the BBCgreen.com website. We did some skyscraper ads due to appear on May 27th for onward to two months. We have done some exhibition work as well.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What are off the page ads?
HARVEY JONES: We have done some advertising in color supplements to weekend newspapers, mainstream newspapers.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What sort of newspapers?
HARVEY JONES: That was in The Guardian and ….
CHRIS BRISTOW: The Observer.
HARVEY JONES: Okay.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: How successful has the site been so far?
HARVEY JONES: It has been moderately successful. On the B2C front, on the consumer front we are always trying to gain traction and we would like increasing numbers to get on there. We have yet to reach the tipping point. We are in the thousands and we need to be, to make it meaningful, tens of hundreds of thousands of registers users. What has been surprising to us that we have attracted quite a lot of interest from the business to business community. Large organizations want to embrace the site and use it for their own staff group for a number of reasons. One of which is, they are engaging their staff in the green message by encouraging them to do something about, first of all look at their carbon cost of their lifestyle. Secondly, to do something about it. Thirdly, to actually start buying more sustainable products, reducing their carbon footprint. That is important. We are in negotiations with one or two organizations that want to include it as part of their flexible benefits package for their staff.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Interesting, so the companies or corporations could offer to their own staff the opportunity to shop through your shopping portal and have their carbon emissions offset.
HARVEY JONES: Yes, and also start buying greener products. Because part of the whole thing is that if an organization wants to go out to the world and convince the world that they are promoting a green message and pursuing one seriously, then there is no point in doing that unless you have engaged your own staff. This is a really compelling way of engaging your own staff in this cause.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Does your website promote or highlight green products?
HARVEY JONES: Yes it does. We will do more and more of this. We also send out a newsletter every couple of weeks and in each of those newsletters, we are highlighting a green product, a green service or an ethical service of some kind. So, yes.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What kind of improvements or additions are you planning for Smartly Green over the next year or two?
CHRIS BRISTOW: We are trying to make it easier for people to remember to use the site. Currently, people’s online purchasing habits are pretty much fixed. They like to go directly to the store. We are trying to make it easier for them to remember to come through Smartly Green each time and we are using some technology hopefully to do that. We want to improve the whole customer experience with saving favorite stores and introducing more product feeds directly to them so we can introduce particularly green products and green services that they may not be aware of. We want to beef up the community section so that we can get more people interacting and take that to a regional level. As much as we have an international platform right now, we not only want to separate that at a country level, but down into regions within the country, so people can fill a much closer tie with the local community and sharing information and perhaps how they can help each other get more involved.
HARVEY JONES: The other thing that we are doing is extending the whole proposition offline. We have recently signed a letter of intent with a loyalty card back-end infrastructure provider. We will be taking the whole proposition offline and extending it that way. It is environmentally friendly to do online shopping, but shopping is also a social experience as well. People want to maintain that contact and engage and continue in that sort of shopping practice.
CHRIS BRISTOW: It is probably better to walk or cycle to the store anyways.
HARVEY JONES: Yes.
CHRIS BRISTOW: We should encourage that.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: What was your inspiration for starting the site in the first place?
CHRIS BRISTOW: I suppose I was always concerned about the environment. I wanted to do more and as Harvey mentioned earlier, when we set out to start a business together we wanted something where we could contribute something back. It just happened to be that something that we both agreed on. We wanted to contribute back to the environment to help people get more engaged. We saw it as an increasingly vast problem that everybody faced. There needs to be a simple solution. There were too many answers or discussions out there that were confusing to the majority of the country. For me it is not only a business, but it is a passion and something that I believe in. The more that we do it, the more that we see that it is a good fight that we should continue doing.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: One thing that I should add to this discussion is that both of the founders have extensive business and IT backgrounds. It is great that you are channeling your experiences into this venture.
HARVEY JONES: Yes. To add to Chris as well. I agree with him. Also, we felt that we spent many, many years in international business and we felt that we’d better use that to the benefit of something which is far more meaningful than the corporate objective, which is something that is more sustainable. That is the other reason that we set this up, in a way that we believe that has not been done before and certainly not in the level that we are doing it. Therefore, we do believe we will get some engagement and some good traction.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Have you encountered any sort of criticism that your site encourages more shopping?
HARVEY JONES: Yes we have. I think that is justified criticism, if that is what we were doing, but we are certainly not. We make pains to point out to people - don’t spend anymore money and don’t change your lifestyle. In fact, we have no problems if they reduce their shopping because that what they should be doing and certainly the shopping that they are doing should be far more sustainable with green merchants. It is the wheels of commerce that people listen to. It is the shopping experience that people are engaged in at the moment and certainly the population that we want to capture into this movement.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Are there any other thoughts that you would like to share with our audience.
HARVEY JONES: Sign up. Register.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Where can they go to sign up for your service?
HARVEY JONES: www.SmartlyGreen.com. I think that the overall thing is that we desperately want to create a community and a global community. We would welcome and encourage people to register on the site and if not to buy anything, then actually to contribute to the blog. That is so important because that does allow people to share in experiences and share things that are going on elsewhere in the world. It is a global community we are trying to create.
CHRIS BRISTOW: The only thing that I would add is that we are at the very beginning of the public awareness for environmental issues and problems that we are going to face. As much as there is a lot of noise in the press and media generally, the public still needs a bit of pushing. I think for other potential green business entrepreneurs out there, the challenge is it’s a long-term solution. It is not a short-term solution. You have really got to keep at it. We try and engage as many other green businesses and entrepreneurs as possible. Because I think that together we have a better chance of all of us being successful in our efforts.
HARVEY JONES: It is true. What we have is Chris and I banging on the doors of large corporates, and because we have a little bit of gray hair between us we are able to get in partly through the door and convince the gatekeeper to let us in. We have been successful in securing some meetings with some high level individuals from multi-national corporations. As Chris said, it is so much better if we can all get together and do this together.
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ: Okay. Well, Chris and Harvey. Thank you very much for the interview.
HARVEY JONES: Thank you.
CHRIS BRISTOW: Our pleasure.
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