It’s not enough for a partnership between two startups to just make good business sense – they also need to have shared values and purposes, Sendle founder James Chin Moody says.
The delivery company has just signed a strategic partnership with US creative marketplace Etsy and Moody says he always makes sure the underlying motivations of the businesses are in alignment.
“With the best partnerships it has to make sense from a business perspective, but you really want deeply held and strongly aligned values and purposes too,” Moody tells StartupSmart.
“You need to have aligned values – then everything becomes easy.”
Etsy and Sendle are both B Corps and certified as “wishing to benefit society as well as their shareholders” and Sendle’s door-to-door delivery service is also carbon neutral.
“There are fairly strong purposes behind the businesses,” Moody says.
“Etsy wants to empower makers and we want to help really great businesses to deliver more reliably and easier.”
As part of the deal, Australian Etsy sellers will get a free Sendle premium account valued at $120 per year. This account gets users $1 off from every delivery.
According to Etsy managing director for Australia Helen Souness, the majority of Aussie sellers on the platform are sole operators working from home.
“Etsy sellers are inherently busy people,” Souness says.
“We know that for every hour they spend making and designing, they spend almost another hour on administration tasks for their Etsy shop, including managing shipping and postage.
“As a fellow certified B Corp, we value Sendle’s commitment to responsible business practices.”
For Sendle, the deal provides access to a new group of customers and helps the company to refine its offering, Moody says.
“Together we realised we could save Etsy sellers’ time and money and that could help us to hone our service and make it work beautifully for those makers and sellers,” he says.
“Now we have the ability to reach out and start understanding these customers and making a beautiful product for them.
“We’ll be working with Etsy over the next year or two to create more beautiful services. We want to keep honing our service and make it better and better.”
He says this all part of Sendle’s big plan to help out SMEs.
“The smaller side of town is generally forgotten in the world of parcel delivery,” Moody says.
“Sendle levels the playing field for them and allows them to finally get big business rates.”
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Denham Sadler is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne.
