Thankyou, the social enterprise that started with one product, bottled water, and has since grown its portfolio to 38 products, is now ready to take the next step. Actually two. One is to launch a Baby care range – Thankyou Baby, the other is to establish a new operation Thankyou New Zealand.
Anyone who has heard Thankyou MD and co-founder Daniel Flynn tell the story of how he and his partners started the successful social enterprise will know that you can’t help but be both deeply moved and inspired to take action.
The latter may take the form of buying or stocking Thankyou products (water, cereal, snack bars, hand wash), or to offer the not-for-profit assistance in the form of a supply chain service.
Now there's another option. At a gala event in Melbourne on 26 February, Thankyou invited companies and individuals to be part of a crowd-funding campaign that will allow the company to scale up its operation.
Here’s how it works: Thankyou has launched Chapter One, a book penned by the 28-year-old Daniel Flynn, at a ‘pay what you want’ price with 100 per cent of the profits to be invested into scaling the business.
The book is Daniel’s ‘raw and real’ personal account of the Thankyou story.
When customers purchase the book at their own determined price, they invest in a crowdfunding campaign to fight global poverty starting with two targets.
The first is $600,000 for Thankyou Baby, a new baby care range sold to fund maternal and infant health programs in Nepal and Tanzania.
Through the funding, Thankyou hopes to reduce preventable maternal mortality and under-five mortality in developing nations, increase access to antenatal and postnatal care, and equip and empower communities with health knowledge and skills.
The second target is a further $600,000 to fund Thankyou’s first leap overseas into New Zealand with a local team, local product and local project partners that Thankyou will work with to make a local and global impact.
"Right now, there are one billion people in our world that live in extreme poverty, but also six billion that don’t. It’s crazy how when you look at the second statistic, all of a sudden the first doesn’t seem that big," Flynn said.
"At Thankyou we believe that it’s possible to eradicate global poverty through all of us collectively making better choices, and this next idea will take that to a whole new level."
Chapter One is now available to buy online at www.thankyou.co and all Relay, Newslink and Watermark bookstores.
And here's Daniel Flynn to share his message in person:
