A marketplace that urges people to buy less

A sustainable design marketplace is trying to convince its customers to buy less, but make each purchase count

Spotted: E-commerce platform Living Deep is on a mission to get its customers to buy less. The sustainable marketplace offers a curated selection of home products from leading green brands and is hoping to convince people to spend a bit more on high-quality, sustainable products that will last a long time. 

Living Deep’s CEO and cofounder Jason F. McLennan has said that the platform wants to challenge the “status quo of consumerism, which is about buying too many things with no consideration of their environmental and social impacts.” Instead, the site helps customers make informed choices, so they can invest in durable products. 

The company not only curates its selection for durability and beauty, but also for environmental and social responsibility. They only select vendors that have “a strong, authentic environmental and social ethos”. All products need to be durable and have extended initial and secondary uses. They also ask all of their vendors to make all packaging recyclable and compostable, and encourage their vendors to secure a Declare 2.0 label – a certification that products are sustainable, use sustainable resources and are recyclable. 

In addition, Living Deep offers customers an easy mechanism to offset the carbon created by their purchase and its shipping. McLennon explains that the goal is to make it easier for consumers to make informed choices about what they buy, saying that “Most existing marketplace sites, even those that are rooted in sustainability, are overwhelming in their offerings, featuring little to no curation, which leaves busy shoppers with frustration where they could be finding education and inspiration to change their habits.” 

Living Deep has combined two important retail trends – curation and sustainability – and combined them on one platform. And they may be on to something – there is increasing evidence that people are giving a lot more thought to what they buy, and where it comes from. This is coming through load and clear in innovations such as the transformation of a Dutch shopping centre into a green cultural quarter and an online food marketplace that only stocks products with low-impact ingredients. 

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