[LifeStyle]No Small Plan: Amid pandemic, Australian consumer brand Thankyou is looking to tackle global poverty

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The world seems to be paying a terrible price this year with the pandemic having aggravated some already-existing problems. Amid all the chaos, however, there are some individuals who are working relentlessly to find solutions for some basic problems that impact a large chunk of the world po[CENSORED]tion.

When ‘Thankyou’ was founded in 2008 by a group of university students, its co-founder and chief visionary Daniel Flynn had “envisioned a brand that could be a bridge between two extremes”. “We saw a world that had extreme consumerism and extreme poverty. Today, $63 trillion is spent globally on consumer products and services, and just before the pandemic, 736 million people were living in extreme poverty,” he tells indianexpress.com over an email interaction, adding they wanted to close the gap between the extremes, “by empowering consumers to help end extreme poverty”.

In September, Flynn’s Australia-based social enterprise extended an invitation to P&G and Unilever — two of the world’s largest and most influential consumer goods companies — to make and distribute Thankyou products globally to help end extreme poverty. Through its campaign ‘No Small Plan’, Thankyou is offering some consumer products — personal care and baby product ranges — for the sole purpose of “funding life-changing projects”.
Fynn seeks the participation of consumers from around the world to encourage the two brands to say ‘I’m in’ and work with them to “flip the system”. On November 5, the brand — which currently sells its products in Australia and New Zealand — will announce which company is in, on one of the largest digital billboards in the world — at New York City’s Times Square.
Poverty is one of the biggest issues for many countries — how has the pandemic exacerbated it?

The world started with a health crisis that led to an economic crisis. Off the back of this new reality, we are seeing a huge regression in the world’s work to reduce extreme poverty. A recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation report shows 37 million more people have been pushed below the extreme poverty line, and a report released by the World Food Programme says that up to 265 million people face severe food crisis, up by 130 million from 2019.

You started with selling your products in Australia and New Zealand; what triggered expansion plans?

We’ve always envisioned Thankyou as a concept with global potential — global consumers buying global products that will make a global positive impact. Australia and New Zealand were where we started, and over the past 12 years, we’ve refined the model. The pandemic fast-tracked our global expansion plans because now more than ever, we think the world needs a model like Thankyou. We made $10 million for our impact partners in the space of a few months selling hand sanitizers and hand wash.

For context, it took 12 years to raise nearly $7m and then when the pandemic hit, we raised a further $10m from collective consumer spending. With extreme poverty going from bad to worse and charities in a free fall as donations are down, we see the urgency to rapidly expand this social enterprise model because we believe we have a solution that the world needs.