Emily Beere leads me to Thriftify’s small office through the labyrinth of Ballyfermot Community Civic Centre, a large, modern public building in a Dublin suburb, the look and feel of which gives me the instant impression of going back to school. Maybe it has to do with the early autumn timing of my interview with the chief sales officer and co-founder of the online shopping start-up.

The unlikely location for what is now an international tech business illustrates its mission to become a positive part of the community as well as a commercially viable venture. This is very much the reason for Beere’s involvement, she tells me as we sit among boxes of second-hand books and clothes rails (although Thriftify is primarily a cloud-based e-commerce platform for charity shops, she explains that some customers spontaneously send donations to the company’s office, too).

Three years ago, an interview with Beere would have taken place in a completely different setting. “I’d been working in New York in a sales role for a tech company, and very much just selling technology to investment bankers to help the rich get richer,” she says. A reassessment of her early career led her to come home to Ireland in 2019.

“Thankfully, the man I was working for in my previous role – we left on very good terms and he actually introduced me to Rónán Ó Dálaigh. I wanted to get into the social enterprise and social innovation side of things and do business for good,” she recalls. What was initially intended as a networking meeting with the serial social entrepreneur led Beere to join Thriftify.

Ó Dálaigh and co-founders Timur Negru and Rahil Nazir had just launched the business to help charity shops sell their donated items online. Its first client was the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI). “So I decided, while I was here and looking for a job, I would volunteer and help them out a few days a week, because they had no experience in sales”, says Beere. “And after a month, that was it, I’d fallen in love with what they were doing. I thought the idea was brilliant. And I joined as a co-founder.”

Two years on, she has “no regrets”.

Thriftify’s business model is to offer a full-service e-commerce platform to charities from item listing to shipping, payment, marketing, customer service, analytics, and everything in between. The company charges a transaction fee – “If they haven’t sold anything, we’re not making any money either,” says Beere. The introductory offer is five per cent of sales for the first six weeks and is then negotiated depending on the size and complexity of each charity’s network of retail shops.

“We’ve started training our own AI to be pricing as well as recognising items.”

In practice, items remain in each of the local shops where they are on sale, from where charity workers enter their details into Thriftify. If they have a barcode, like books, a lot of the process is automated. “Everything that they scan and want to sell online is obviously for sale on Thriftify.ie, but it’s also for sale on seven different eBay marketplaces across Europe, I think eight different Amazon marketplaces, we’re on Google Shopping, Facebook… We want to keep expanding the different channels that we’re on,” says Beere.

“We also provide 100 per cent compostable packaging. So all the charity has to do is scan the item uploaded for sale. When it sells, they get a little notification and they just click one button, it prints an An Post label for them. And they can just put it in our packing bag and send it on its way.”

As I meet Beere, Thriftify is finalising a new app with further capabilities. “We’ve started training our own AI to be pricing as well as recognising items. So the goal is, eventually, you’ll just be able to take a picture of any dress and the app will suggest that maybe it looks like a Zara red short dress or anything like that, and be suggesting a price based on what similar items have sold on different platforms in the past,” she says.

Pandemic acceleration

Since the onset of Covid-19, Beere has had a front-row seat to observe consumers’ changing habits. “The sales on the website, all throughout lockdown I think, were tripling on a monthly basis. The growth rates were mind-blowing to us,” she says. This has dropped since bricks-and-mortar retail reopened and she expects some levelling off to continue in the coming months, but still “much higher than pre-pandemic levels, for sure”.

Beere defines a social enterprise as a profit-making business where positive social results take priority over financial ones. “For us, it’s not about making money, it’s about making that money have a really, really successful impact,” she says. This means Thriftify is not a charity itself, and therefore not tied to the reporting obligations a non-profit organisation has in terms of spending funding on particular causes.

“We get to run as a business, which makes us quite agile, considering we’re working on charity retail organisations. They can’t afford to be agile, they can’t afford to make quick changes, everything needs to be signed off,” she adds. “We can be that agile tech partner that they need.”

This also means going to investors for funding. Last October, Thriftify raised half a million euro in seed capital from Enterprise Ireland, London-based founder of Cleantech Capital Advisors Ben Lynch and Elkstone Partners. Beere says Lynch and Elkstone’s Alan Merriman have offered advice to the board as well as hard cash. The company is now raising interim funding and targets a series A round next year.

Carbon calculator

Having external backers means delivering verifiable results across profits and impact. “One thing we’re working on at the moment is a carbon calculator,” says Beere, to measure the environmental benefits of second-hand items sold through charity shops instead of being dumped and replaced by newly manufactured ones. Early indications are that those sold on Thriftify avoided 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions last year, she adds.

From the founding team of four Beere joined in 2019, funding to date has allowed Thriftify to grow to 21 employees, she says. Most of them are on the development team – “the technology is what we’re really focused on”. Some developers work out of the company’s Pakistan office, where chief technology officer Nazir is from. Thriftify also employs remote workers in India to provide 24-hour cover thanks to time zone differences.

After the business launched in the UK in the past year, Beere says the country will be its main focus for the coming year. “The UK is very advanced when it comes to e-commerce and it’s been great to see the reaction to our solution,” she says. According to her, a lot of British charity shops already sell on eBay and want to do more online. “In their minds, expanding to other channels just creates a host of new challenges, because it’s just a brand new marketplace that they have to monitor. So it means increasing their team. By using Thriftify, it’s combining them all into one platform.”

Two years since returning from New York, Beere herself is now about to move to London for a time, joining Ó Dálaigh who has already set up camp there.

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