PANGEA Movement Founder William DiRicco on Regenerating the Environment

We are creating the most regenerative products in the world, preventing trash from entering the ocean, and restoring mangrove forests. 

Marcos and I met while backpacking through South America, looking for beautiful beaches and untouched nature. No matter how beautiful the location or how remotely we ventured, we would find trash and observe the devastating effects on the environment. We are now creating innovative products for nature lovers and travelers so that their purchases can fund the protection and preservation of these natural places.

Marcos and I met in South America while traveling in 2018. We started the company from our laptops and continued to travel for another year. We got some traction in 2020 with the launch of our first product, which sold $150,000 in the first month. Later that year, we raised our pre-seed round from a venture capital firm called REAPRA and started to accelerate growth. Now we are a team of six full-time workers, with a network of part-time and freelance workers supporting the business.

The belief from many outdoor brands is that “sustainable” means “doing no harm.” We understand that to solve the complex problems that are destroying the remaining outdoor landscape, we need to go beyond and regenerate the planet. Every purchase of a PANGEA product has a massive positive impact for the planet. All of our products are designed and created by us, with sustainable and circular supply chains implemented into the manufacture and production of our products. On top of that, every $10 spent with PANGEA intercepts four pounds of trash on its way to the ocean and removes four pounds of carbon dioxide from the sky.

The competitive landscape has companies that are doing very well with sustainable messaging and selling outdoor products. Cotopaxi and Patagonia are great examples. PANGEA can disrupt the entire sustainable outdoor category by going beyond the donation model and filling the demand for direct, quantifiable impact. By avoiding donation and making all of the impact ourselves, we create super efficient solutions. Because of this, we  have been able to achieve the most direct impact per dollar on the market. If anyone can find someone making more direct impact per dollar than PANGEA, please let us know so we can beat them.

We will build an in-house product development team that can improve and accelerate our proven product-launching strategy. Our new target will be one new product launch per quarter. We will also build an in-house content and marketing team that can scale our existing products on Shopify, Amazon, and other platforms. Finally, we will use some of the funds to supply inventory to our top-selling countries. This will improve shipping time and ensure we don’t sell out of our best-selling products.

PANGEA is built for survival. We are keeping reserves in the company for 18 months of runway in case we enter a recession. If we do enter a recession, we will stay lean and flip our operations into profit in three to six months. During that time, we will be able to take market share from our competitors who did not plan and are forced to go out of business. 

If we do not enter a recession and the economy and spending stay strong, we will invest in more aggressive growth and prepare to raise another round at a higher valuation in 2023.

We have about 10 products in our pipeline. We will hire an expert in product development to execute on creating prototypes of our product pipeline. We will produce one new product per quarter, and we will produce them in order of their speed to production. Some products take much longer to manufacture and produce than others. 

As for the movement, our plastic-catching barriers and mangrove restoration are highly efficient and highly scalable. We solved three rivers in three months with 17 barriers, which created more than one year’s worth of our impact promise. We can very easily scale the impact as our sales increase. 

We will not stop. Our mission is far too important, and our solution is the most efficient we have ever seen. We are built for survival. Our company has the cash reserves and financial discipline to survive a recession or market downturn, even if it lasts up to two years. 

Outdoor adventure lovers are the perfect target. They spent $100 billion in 2021. We have demonstrated an ability to capture and convert this audience effectively. As more and more customers ask for direct, quantifiable regeneration of the planet, PANGEA will be one of the first and most well-trusted names producing high-quality products that fulfill this need.

Here are our 10-year targets: 

• $100 million USD in sales per year
• 100 million trees planted
• 100 rivers restored
• One cleanup in every country in the world