How darelle worked for me.

I’m a small business owner. I run a small sporting goods shop in East Vancouver with my wife and two employees. Our son James has just started working at the shop as well, as he recently had his fifteenth birthday. We do okay for a small family run business, but we don’t have the marketing budget to really compete with “the big guys”… we rely on our regulars, word of mouth, and some traditional advertising via newpapers and radio. We’ve also just broken into the world of social media, and we’re starting to get some traction with twitter and facebook.

James has been playing hockey since he was five, and in addition to driving him to and from the rink so that he can fulfill his dream as an NHL superstar, I also help coach when I can. The team recently had a great opportunity to go to a tournament in Cranbrook, and the kids were all very excited about it. We had a meeting with some of the other parents to look at the associated costs, and realized that in order to make it affordable for the parents, we were going to have to do some fundraising in order to be able to send them. This is when one of the other parents mentioned darelle.

She told us that they were a site that could help us with our fundraising efforts just by signing ourselves up as a charity — a portion of every sale that darelle makes on their website is given to one of their registered charities. I naturally asked (skeptically) what they sell. She told me that they don’t sell anything, they provide a forum for consumers and businesses to share what they want to buy, or what they want to sell, and for what price.

A lightbulb went off in my head.

I explored the site, and it was exactly as I had hoped. I could register my business on darelle, post an offer for the goods that I was already selling in my store, and have a portion of every sale donated to help the fundraising efforts of the team. It was a win/win/win, for myself and my business, for the team, and for the consumers who would be buying my goods at a discounted price. The team at darelle would share my offer through their social media channels, provide me links to do the same, and provide me opportunities to make offers on Buy Requests that had already been requested by other users.

I quickly signed up, and posted an offer for $100 worth of sporting equipment for $80. Within two weeks, I had 500 of the offers purchased! This blew away our fundraising goal, gave me $4000 in revenue with NO traditional or paid advertising, AND introduced our business to new customers who we’ve seen come back many times since. James and his team didn’t win the hockey tournament, but they had a blast in Cranbrook, without us as parents having to spend neaerly as much as we would have otherwise.

We’ll definitely be using darelle for future fundraising, future marketing for our business, and I’ve already added myself to ten of the other Buy Requests that I saw on the site. Just waiting now for another business to see this opportunity and send me an offer!

This story isn’t true, but it could be. At darelle, we benefit consumers, businesses, and charities with every offer that goes through our site. Go to darelle.com today and sign yourself up, and tell darelle what we can do for you!