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Two Young Social Media Entrepreneurs Develop What May Be The Next TOMS Shoes
Two young social media prodigies create a successful online clothing archetype for raising capital and awareness for charities. With outrageous success, the company has had even greater start-up impact than its 'social-good' predecessor TOMS shoes.
When we hear the term "social entrepreneur" we tend to think philanthropy. But what happens when social media and social entrepreneurship collide? Southern California's Dale Partridge, 26, and Aaron Chavez, 19, may have created themselves the perfect storm. A storm that might only be created by two of our nation's most innovative social media experts.
Their model which they named "Sevenly", was born from an innate desire to help others. Over the years, both Dale and Aaron have had a heart for the hurting, the sick, and the hungry. CEO, Dale Partridge says, "After recognizing not only the immense suffering that millions of individuals endure each day, but taking a moment to recognize the unthinkable suffering of the single individual. When you shrink the numbers from millions to one, it clears an emotional block, and enables your heart to break. This realization sparked a paradigm shift in our entrepreneurial efforts." Dale continues to say," Prior to Sevenly, both Aaron and I owned highly successful ventures producing seven digit revenues, but it was empty. The need for a sustainable, life changing model for good, became so evident, that we knew we were being called to a new adventure."
After months of extensive research, they realized the problem was not a willingness to help the poor and feed the hungry. Dale says, "No, many were willing to do so. Charities around the globe do this and do it well. The problem was that the passion driven charities that were built to fulfill this need, were going out of business." They realized that over 4,000 much needed charities were going out of business each year due to three key items: funding, awareness, and following.
Backed with their research and armed with passion, the two young entrepreneurs made the hard-hitting decision to walk away from their success, and pursue a business model they say is, "a powerhouse for world change." By utilizing their innovative tactics of social media, and leveraging their substantial network of online influencers, the two built a model that encompassed the key components of today's most successful online archetypes.
This is how it works, every week (7 days) http://www.Sevenly.org partners with a new, qualified non-profit. Sevenly creates a unique t-shirt design that represents that charity's specific cause (hunger, disease prevention, etc). The tee is only available at http://www.Sevenly.org for seven days, and then its gone forever. And for every tee sold, Sevenly will give seven dollars directly to that week's charity. For example, if Sevenly sold 1,000 cause tees for the American Red Cross, then Sevenly would write a check to the charity for $7,000. But it goes much further than that.
Sevenly has intricately designed their model, their website, and their proprietary processes to leverage social media. C.O.O. Aaron Chavez stated, "Every single component of our online presence has been obsessively examined. The model was designed to not just raise money, but awareness as well. We spend most of our day integrating ways to leverage the power of the "share". For example, our first week we designed a cause tee for an Anti-Sex Trafficking charity out of Washington D.C., and within 5 days the link had been shared on Facebook over 10,000 times, we sold almost 900 tees and raised over $6000 dollars to end the global sex trade." Since then, Sevenly has continued to have success with each charity and in their first year anticipates raising over $250,000 towards keeping charities in business.
Dale says, "Our confidence derives from our mission, everybody wants to help out a charity that touches their heart. The problem was, until Sevenly, there wasn't a simple way to do so. Sevenly offers people a simple and easy way to change someone's life. For example, During our launch in June 2011 our model managed to generate a staggering 120,000+ page views in less than 30 days, which is unheard of for an organic start-up. People truly want to change the world, and Sevenly is here to let them do it."
