ONBOARD BRANDS was born from a direct response to a real pain point. In 2019, our co-founders, Annie and Natasha, first established AKOJO MARKET, an ecommerce platform championing over 70 artisan makers in emerging markets. They wanted to onboard brands as quickly as possible and with complete visibility of their supply chains. They had wonderful conversations across whatsapp, zoom, email, but found it difficult to capture information in a consistent, robust way that was speedy enough to onboard all the hundreds of brands in the pipeline.
Not finding any existing solutions on the market, and believing that, surely, they weren’t the only ones facing these challenges, the team built software to make onboarding and due diligence easier for busy, customer-facing multi-brand businesses. Our mission is to foster transparency in the retail supply chain, and help companies of all sizes to approach new relationships with respect, curiosity and collaboration to make positive changes.
The retail industry can’t keep going as it is. New legislation
is coming in that centres on due diligence to achieve
transparent, comprehensive information collection and
remedial action. It is not enough to say
you didn’t know.
These include:
There’s a lot of discussion around impact and ESG. We’ll do our best to break it down. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is a method of assessing the material risks that your business and its activities pose. When we consider environmental risk, we’re thinking about the use of hazardous materials. When we consider social risk, we’re talking about human rights abuses such as exploitation and forced labour. And when we discuss governance, we’re speaking of corruption, transparency, diversity.
These are not, in our opinion, “nice-to-have’s”, but critical compliance and operational issues that need to be addressed. We understand that you don’t have the same responsibility to address issues in your business partners supply chains as you might your own. Or to dig deep into their supply chain.
So our helpful, automated due diligence questionnaire will find out the key pieces of information that you need to know to decide if the partner is someone you can work with, from an ESG as well as values, operational and compliance perspective.
We want to go beyond that, and help you work with brands to draw out the “positive” impact they have on people and planet. It may be harder to quantify, but is equally important in the movement towards responsible business and positive change. It is the exact information your customers would love to know about.
A framework we use and can be helpful in achieving positive impact are the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which strive for real change across 17 identified challenges.
