Shopping for a home with sustainability in mind can be a maze. Between greenwashing, expensive products, and navigating dozens of creator websites, many customers give up and end up on Amazon or IKEA.
To bring clarity and efficiency into home goods shopping, Jaclyn Tracy built SISTAIN, and hopes to make sustainable shopping a delightful experience.
In your own words, how would you describe your company?
SISTAIN is a personalized, social shopping experience for sustainable home goods. We make sustainable living easy and aspirational by facilitating product discovery via AI-driven recommendations, creator content, and a transparent, sustainable database.
What inspired you to take the leap and start this company?
I started SISTAIN to fill a void in the market that I desperately wanted. When I first began my own sustainability journey, I was completely overwhelmed by the information I found online. On the one hand, much of what I read was geared towards a zero-waste lifestyle, a lifestyle I greatly respect (my brother lives what I would consider to be a zero-waste lifestyle off-grid in Northern Minnesota), but one that felt unobtainable living in an urban city. When shopping for sustainable products, it was difficult to parse which brands were sustainable and which were just greenwashing. Those products that were truly sustainable often compromised on design. I wanted a community to help me make large and incremental changes as I strove to be more sustainable in my everyday life. I wanted a place where I could buy sustainable goods for my home that were aesthetically beautiful, of good quality, and timeless. I decided to take a risk, leave the successful marketing agency I had founded, and launch SISTAIN to be that community and that platform.
Who is your typical customer?
The typical SISTAIN customer is the modern health-conscious millennial woman. She has a robust social life and a fulfilling profession and wants to be more conscious of her purchasing decisions. She wants to buy goods that match her aesthetics but are non-toxic and better for the planet and her well-being. She also values community.
We have customers who are simply looking to elevate their everyday routine by adding SISTAIN’s sustainable alternatives. But we also have customers going through overwhelming life stage transitions: getting married, moving into a new apartment, or buying a first home.
What does the competitive landscape look like, and how do you differentiate?
Our competitive landscape includes large brands like Crate & Barrel that are design-forward but lack true sustainability. Smaller brands like Package Free have sustainable home goods but lack design. Platforms like Etsy feature a community-based marketplace but lack quality control and sustainability standards. SISTAIN puts trust, design, and community at the center of everything we do. All products on our platform, whether from third-party sellers or the SISTAIN collection, meet the highest standards of sustainability and design. In addition, our supportive community and the opportunity to earn a commission for promoting our products keep our customers actively engaged.
How are you going to improve your product in the next couple of years?
Over the next year, we will build several key platform features. We are integrating AI into our eCommerce platform to make more intelligent and personalized recommendations to our customers. For example, suppose your personal design aesthetic is mid-century modern. In that case, you will be presented with images of the goods you are shopping for in an aesthetically similar environment to envision better how it would feel in your home.
We are building a robust database to score the sustainability attributes of the various brands we work with across seven key areas. This will give our customers unprecedented insight into the brands they purchase and allow them to filter products against the sustainability, ethical, or overall impact criteria that matter to them most.
We are also building out our creator platform and program, allowing our customers and influencers alike to build and promote shoppable collections on which they can then earn a commission.
What are your revenues projections for 2023 and how do you plan to grow it further next year?
We anticipate ending 2023 with $110K in revenue, doubling our sales from 2022. By executing our product roadmap, expanding our creator program, investing in digital marketing, and further growing our brand recognition with brick-and-mortar pop-ups and influencer outreach, we will reach $1.1M in GMV in 2024 to build to $92M in GMV by 2028.
What is your break-even point?
Based on our current projections, we expect to reach profitability by 2027, once we reach $33M in revenue.
If we speak again in 12 months, which milestones will you have achieved?
In 12 months, we will have launched our creator program and platform with 2K creators onboard, integrated a searchable sustainability database into our platform, grown to 7K customers and $1.1M in GMV, and developed our generative AI features to deliver a more personalized shopping experience.
