Company: YoungPlanet
Founders: Jason & Emma Ash, 2019
Website: https://www.youngplanet.com/
Business: App that enables parents to put no-longer-used children’s things to good use with new families and away from landfill, for free.
About YoungPlanet
YoungPlanet is an app that helps families exchange parenting and children’s items for free. Founded by Jason and Emma Ash in 2019, their strapline encourages families to, ‘declutter, give joy and save the planet’. YoungPlanet aims to combat the high cost and high waste conditions of raising children, by delivering meaningful and positive impacts for both the environment and family budgets. The platform digitises and scales the process of family ‘hand-me-downs’, to provide a mechanism for parents to both save money and reduce their environmental impact.
Jason and Emma have always looked for ways to reduce their family’s own environmental footprint, and wanted to encourage others to do the same. They were inspired to create the app after a visit to a garage sale, where a seller decided to give one of their sons a toy truck for free after seeing how much he enjoyed playing with it. To date, the YoungPlanet app has saved over 20,000 children’s items and toys from going to landfill, thanks to a community of more than 80,000 users.
To overcome the challenge of creating a two-sided marketplace, Jason and Emma initially focused on developing one micro-community at a time in neighbourhoods across London. After getting the app to work on a small scale, they were able to expand out from those locations and build a network of sustainable communities all over the country. YoungPlanet’s users became informal ambassadors of the app, which encouraged other parents to embrace this concept and allowed usage to grow organically.
Despite temporarily pausing operations at the start of the pandemic, whilst the team ensured the sharing of items could continue safely, YoungPlanet has since gone from strength to strength, quadrupling in size this year. An increased desire for sustainable living, coupled with the desire from families to reduce household costs, has boosted demand for the app and the children’s toys and products it makes available to local families.
Looking ahead, YoungPlanet aims to become the world’s best, most loved, (and free) circular economy platform, committed to reducing both the environmental and financial impact of parenting. With the help of its partners and its growing business and consumer subscription base, YoungPlanet hopes to develop an international presence over the next year, by expanding into three more overseas markets in 2022. There’s no reason that it can’t ultimately have the breadth and depth of eBay!
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