Helping local, green products reach shop shelves

The platform helps small companies build their inventory and connect with professional buyers

Spotted: This year will see several changes designed to bring the EU closer to its climate-neutral goal for 2050. The first report of the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is due at the end of January 2024, and the region’s Deforestation Regulation comes into effect in December 2024. Back in December 2023, the European Council and Parliament also reached an agreement on ecodesign requirements for sustainable products. 

For companies with sustainable products to sell, these changes are creating opportunities to expand into new markets or make new designs commercially available. However, inflation in the prices smaller businesses pay their increasingly globalised suppliers is making it difficult for them to build their inventory – even if they have developed a great product and built an effective production process.

Belgian company Shiperise helps with this challenge by buying companies’ inventory in large volumes at factory prices. By receiving a price for its goods from Shiperise, a business can optimise production runs and negotiate better procurement prices with its suppliers. And by investing in the company’s inventory, Shiperise is taking on some of the risk associated with new products that conventional banks are unwilling to bear.

The funds from Shiperise are transferred to a company as soon as its goods arrive from its suppliers. The company then has 18 months to resell the products at wholesale prices before ‘repurchasing’ the inventory Shiperise has acquired at its own pace. Businesses sell the Shiperise-funded portion of its inventory first and it only pays for the goods that are sold in each period. Shiperise is compensated for its service through a minimum margin on its inventory purchases and an admin fee.

At the start of the process, Shiperise offers a free product score, working with most types of items except food. The maximum score on a product review is 50, with questions covering topics such as item sustainability and the sales history of the company. For those scoring below the maximum, Shiperise offers advice on score improvement. The product scores determine how much funding Shiperise is likely to offer for the product.

On the other side of the equation, shops and resellers can register on the platform as ‘professional buyers’ to acquire sustainable goods from the Shiperise ecosystem and benefit from discounts.

Reducing e-waste with upgradeable parts and using artificial intelligence (AI) to assess products’ sustainability credentials are two examples from Springwise’s library of innovations that are helping consumers cut through the greenwashing and find products that really make a difference.

Written By: Keely Khoury and Matthew Hempstead