We’ve got big news to share – Glad has been named Best Social Impact Startup at the 2025 Startup Innovation Awards. This recognition isn’t just for our team, it’s for the whole Glad community, every member, every partner, every person who’s believed in the idea has helped make this possible.

In this episode of Glad Tidings, Ben shares:

• Why this award matters and what it means for the Glad community

• Three new brands joining the platform – Gousto, Posh Totty and Evolve Organic Beauty

• How we’re using AI to make our partner checks smarter and faster

• A simple way you can double your impact by inviting a friend to join Glad

We’re growing fast, and every new member means more greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere. This award is a brilliant reminder that we’re heading in the right direction.

Watch Episode #11 now

Links

Watch on Youtube and Spotify and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Hi everyone, my name's Ben Wynn and this is Glad Tidings. This is the weekly update on the progress we're making towards cleaning up the atmosphere as the Glad Climate community. Last week I told you we were shortlisted for an award and I'm delighted to say that we've won that award and we are, if I read it, the Best Social Impact Startup according to the 2025 Startup Innovation Awards. Really, really pleased that we've got that, not just...for the immediate team of the business, but for the entire community, because it gives us external recognition that what we're doing is actually having a real impact. If you're following along on our socials, expect a bombardment because we're very proud of it. We're going to be sharing it. so yeah, if you can and you see that, I'd love you to amplify it and share it across your own socials. That would be really, really helpful. So thank you.

Okay, so next thing I want to talk to you about this week is brands because we've got quite an update on brands. First of all, very quick reminder, the way the process works for us adding a brand and therefore saving to the Glad community, to the Glad site is a three stage process. We do initial screening to make sure that the category is not on our block list. It's one that we want to be supporting. And then we do a due diligence process internally, which I'll tell you more about.

And lastly, we get you guys to vote. So finally it's you that decides whether a brand and a saving goes into the Glad community. Last week we asked you about three brands, Gusto, the food delivery service, Posh Totty, a jeweler, and Evolve Organic Beauty selling some amazing beauty products. And all three were unanimously voted through and therefore are already on the website. So you can take advantage of their savings now. And...we've got quite a backlog. We're in a brilliant position now where some really interesting brands, names that you will have definitely heard of, not necessarily high street names because a lot of them retail only online, but names that are very recognisable and have already established themselves as really lead players in the purpose led movement with some great products and great services. And they're coming to us because they recognise the value of what we're doing.

They want to be in front of you guys. They want to be promoting themselves to a community of climate conscious individuals. So we've got a backlog and therefore we need some help. I mentioned to you previously that we had a due diligence process. We call it the partner charter and we've been doing this entirely manually and therefore we've sped things up. We've built an AI agent to allow us to do that due diligence, that kind of desk research on each of the brands we work with in a far significantly less amount of time. And so this AI works, the input is really, really simple. provide the brand name and the website, and then it looks across a whole range of different things. So I should mention a few. First of all, it starts by looking at the company itself, its size and its structure, where it's located, so that we've got the context. And of course it looks at that product category and makes an assessment about that.

But then much more interestingly, what it starts to do is look for any signal the brand is sending about its own purpose led impact sustainability strategy. So certifications or memberships that it has. And then the statements it's making on its own website. Beyond that, what we're doing is using sentiment analysis across a whole range of different things. We look at customer reviews on platforms like Trustpilot. We look at employee reviews on platforms like Glassdoor. We look at Companies House and the records there to get a real sense of who is this that we're starting to work with, who is it that we'd be recommending to the community. What we also do is look across publicly available media. So are there any red flags? That's really what we're looking for. Are there any reasons not to work with this brand? The AI then performs a risk assessment, and we use that as an input, not as a decision, but as an input to our decision as a committee when we review whether to put the brands in front of you for vote. And because of that AI and because of that inbound from a growing number of brands, we've got quite a backlog. So the ask here for you is this week you should have a few brands in your member newsletter that we want you to vote on.

The following week it's likely to be quite a lot of brands because our focus right now is to get the value of as high as possible and to do that we need as many brands and as many savings as we can. And that's our exclusive focus because the faster we get that value up the more attractive Glad is the quicker we'll be able to sign up new members and the quicker we sign up new members the quicker the impact total goes up the more benefit we're having the more green-ass gas we clean up.

So whilst we're exclusively focused on adding those savings, we need your help. And the way you can help is by doubling your impact. And the really simple way you can do that is by telling a friend. Think of that one person who you think would both benefit from the savings of the partners that we've already got live and the ones that are coming in the coming weeks and as someone who really wants to play their part.

Do their bit and help clean up the atmosphere. And if you can think of those people, tell them about Glad get them to sign up and you will have doubled the impact, the positive impact that you're having on the planet. So that's my ask for this week. This is a short update, but hopefully very poignant because we want your help, we want your input, we want you to help grow this community. So please take that away, go do that and I'll see you this time next week. Thanks a lot guys.

See you soon.