Meet The founder: Bagboard, The Adtech Platform Designed Powering A Sustainable Future

When investing, your capital is in danger. 

Think about being the primary to find billboards. That’s what it looks like for Bagboard, the sustainable advert platform unlocking hundreds of thousands of kilos in untapped promoting income.

Bagboard have constructed a full-service and internationally scalable tech platform that prints adverts on planet-friendly luggage, that are each free for consumers to make use of, and for retailers to distribute. As customers transfer about and generate advert impressions, they acquire distinctive spending energy to interact with the various sustainable manufacturers promoted in Bagboard’s market.

On observe to have practically a million customers by 2025, Bagboard is provided with first-mover benefit in a revolutionary new market. Backed by over 250 buyers, they simply hit 100% of their funding goal. 

Right here’s the way it works.

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What’s Bagboard’s imaginative and prescient?

The promoting trade is price $563bn globally but it surely has diminishing returns. There are a number of information channels on the market, all of that are saturated with confusion and misinformation.

Our analysis discovered that 84% of customers don’t belief conventional promoting. On prime of that, over 67% of customers wish to change their habits to scale back their affect on the setting. However this may be tough once they don’t know which manufacturers they will belief, or which manufacturers are actually sustainable. On the opposite facet of the market, main manufacturers are boycotting promoting giants over lack of social motion – Ben & Jerry’s is a primary instance.

That’s the place Bagboard steps in. Our adtech and m-commerce platform is ready to revolutionise and remodel the advert trade as we all know it, and drive sustainability on a worldwide scale. We plan to do that by unlocking hundreds of thousands in untapped promoting income, by reconnecting planet-friendly manufacturers with a rapidly-growing community of acutely aware customers. We then reward customers for his or her time, information and a spotlight with a digital forex they will spend on those self same manufacturers. 

In different phrases, we empower customers to unlock their spending energy as a collective power for good. 

How did the corporate begin?

Bagboard was based in 2016 by Ben Ayres, a credit score dealer in London. He seen simply what number of single-use plastic service luggage had been nonetheless getting used across the metropolis, regardless of the plastic air pollution dialog being entrance of thoughts for environmentalists around the globe. He got down to substitute every one with eco-friendly paper luggage and in flip, leverage them as promoting actual property.

The founding crew realised that if this new type of promoting platform was operated by customers, who got full management of the media, we may empower folks to take management of their spending and drive social and environmental change.

What are the pillars of the enterprise mannequin?

Our PaaS know-how is the important thing to our enterprise mannequin, we’ve constructed a extremely refined omni-channel functionality. By incorporating totally different applied sciences like RFID, QR codes, Knowledge Science, Algorithmic evaluation and M-Commerce, we’re capable of drive customers to our app, the place they’re incentivised to interact with the manufacturers in our market.

Our proprietary know-how is all constructed in-house so we will add, change and enhance extra performance as required. It’s additionally simply transportable around the globe.

What has been the best problem to this point?

Explaining the enterprise mannequin! Bagboard is basically three companies in a single. First, there’s the patron proposition linked to our m-commerce and app platforms, the place customers can unlock spending energy and have interaction with manufacturers. Second, there’s the Model and Media Company proposition which encompasses our in-app market providing. Third, we’ve constructed a complicated tech platform that hyperlinks every part collectively in a method the market’s actually by no means seen earlier than. 

No different firm like Bagboard exists. So we don’t have the benefit of “me too” comparisons. We have now to elucidate the working mannequin in nice element and a few components lean into difficult information science-based ideas.

What was one of the thrilling successes to this point?

Undoubtedly when Sky Ocean Ventures made their preliminary funding in us final yr. The due diligence course of was robust, and our industrial mannequin and methodology was subjected to robust scrutiny. So once they mentioned sure we assist you and wish to make investments, it was an exterior validation of every part our crew has all the time believed attainable.

What partnerships do you’ve gotten for the time being and are there any upcoming?

It’s been so thrilling to deliver new companions on board, and we’re all the time looking out for manufacturers we will work with to deliver this proposition to life around the globe. 

In the beginning, we raised a complete of £2.four million from main buyers together with Sky Ocean Ventures and Sky Ocean Rescue, who’re dedicated to ending the devastating circulate of plastic into the ocean. In its easiest type, Bagboard replaces single-use plastic luggage in shops with eco-friendly paper ones, counteracting the 5 trillion plastic luggage used the world over every year. At launch, we signed a 250okay good bag marketing campaign from Sky Ocean Rescue.

In 2018, we secured partnership with The Plastic Financial institution, the NGO that removes and recycles ocean-bound plastic from the Philippines, Haiti and Indonesia. For each good bag reuse logged on the Bagboard app, we direct a portion of the income straight to them to allow them to assist maintain our oceans clear.

A few of our present model partnerships embrace Sky Ocean Rescue, Unilever (Ben & Jerry’s), WWF and Loop. We’ve additionally had the pleasure of working with HelloFresh!, Ocado and Laundrapp.

What new options do you’ve gotten within the pipeline?

This present ASA spherical and the deliberate VC increase later this yr, will allow us to do two issues:

1. To develop our client community to 250,000 customers by the tip of 2021 by elevated advertising and marketing exercise.
2. To construct an public sale website for our advert campaigns. It will comply with related ideas to Google or Fb advertisements, whereby manufacturers and companies “bid” for premium slots in our bag distribution and client community. It is going to be a dynamic platform on which manufacturers and companies can view the momentum and engagement their campaigns are producing in real-time, and growing their bid measurement so as to meet their marketing campaign goals.

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To hitch over 250 buyers serving to Bagboard construct a completely new promoting platform, go to the pitch now.

Michaela Salomon

Marketing campaign Assist Workforce