Tip Me: improving living wages through direct tipping
Welcome to our first feature in a series of articles showcasing impact startups doing amazing things around the world. Here, we would be diving into Tip Me, a German-based company that allows for direct, transparent tipping from consumer to workers to improve living wages in LDCs.
In conversation with: Jonathan Funke, Founder and CEO of Tip Me
UNSDGs: #1: No Poverty / #2: Zero Hunger / #8: Decent Work and Economic Growth / #12: Responsible Consumption and Production
Looking to fundraise: 170,000€ from Angels (raising 550,000€ in total)
The Problem: The idea behind Tip Me came up during a demonstration against Primark. The founder, Jonathan Funke, was convinced that it was wrong to pay less for a t-shirt than for a coffee. He distributed flyers from Oxfam saying that only 3% of the prices of a t-shirt goes to the sewers. If we could send a couple of cents to these workers in a direct and safe manner, we could have a significant impact on their lives.
The Solution: Tip Me is a fair chain digital solution for online shops, letting customers pay tips to garment workers and producers in LDCs directly. The company addresses consumers’ growing demand for sustainability, fairness, and transparency; the demand for a direct connection to the origin of products; and the demand for emotional and storytelling value.
The Market: The solution of the company can be applied to a wide range of various online market segments, but for the German market of fashion in E-Commerce which amounts to approximately €15.35bn, including €4.82bn for sustainable fashion brands, the estimated TAM for Tip Me amounts to almost €30mn only within this segment.
The Team: CEO and founder Jonathan Funke has a strong social impact background, winning various awards, and initiating social initiatives such as “Sharewood” and “Stadt, Land, Flow”. He is among the youngest TEDx Speakers in Germany. Together with Robin Collin (Co-founder), Helen Deacon (Co-founder), and Oliver Sonnenwald the team also has expertise in the areas of Sustainability, Supply Chain Management, Security Policies, Cultural Sciences, and Information Technology.
Recent Success:
- Almost every second online shopper is willing to make use of Tip Me solutions
- More than 200 workers in LDCs and Germany already receive tips
- ~1.300 workers families of average 6+ people benefit of these tips
- More than €10,000 in tips have been collected for 3 companies
- More than 2,000 consumers know about the origin and the people that made the product
Recent Challenges: Talent acquisition in Marketing & Sales as well as in Project Management, the automation of transactions, worker onboarding, and the integration in the Shopify app.
Why we love Tip Me: The world’s population is expected to grow from 7 to 10 billion in the next 30 years and it is highly unlikely that we can continue with economic growth by further exhaustion of the planet’s resources and the failure to address the significant rise in inequalities. To contribute to change, today’s customers need easy options of making the world a better place. Tip Me was founded to solve the problem of unfair supply chains. It believes a fair globalization is possible, but it requires transparency, empathy, and easy options to have a positive impact on the world: the global tip.
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