Cluey is a web platform & Chrome extension that shows the impact the brands you buy have on people 👥, the planet 🌎 and politics 🗳️ and suggests alternatives that are better aligned with your personal values.
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Cool idea, congrats on the launch @maryclaire_manard ! Can you share my about the prototype phase? How did you go about testing and validating that consumers' buying behavior would change after learning of a company's political contribution history?
@laurel_marcus Laurel - Great questions and happy to share some insights around that prototype phase! It was a very rudimentary mobile app (we took it down this past spring to focus on the new product) and with word-of-mouth promotion last year we were able to secure 600 individuals using the app, 98% of which were repeat users, and over 50% engaging in "liking" and "disliking" brands they were searching. Downloads for the app spiked on election week, over Thanksgiving (when political discussions with family/extended family gets intense), and following Jan 6th. This indicated a deep emotional desire of users who wanted to take action with their consumer power. Additionally, with some more qualitative insights we gathered through user interviews and social media re-shares, users indicated they would no longer be buying certain brands based on their learnings from what we were sharing and had either located an alternative or were in the process of doing so. All of this to say that we realized this change has major potential if (1) the information is easy to access and digest (2) alternatives are readily available to be found and (3) consumers can begin to connect the dots on how their individual actions add up to a greater whole.
We're hoping to achieve those three points with this latest product (will need continued evolution of course, but we're hopeful to be on our way!)
@laurel_marcus One last quantitative stat: We surveyed ~300 individuals before launching that prototype and 89% indicated "negative press" about a brand had altered their purchasing behavior. When asked to elaborate, the answers ranged from treatment of workers, to public stances on social issues, to journalistic exposés, but political contributions was among the common responses.
👋 I’m Maryclaire, founder and CEO of Cluey Consumer - a web platform and Chrome extension that empowers consumers to make a greater impact on people 👥, the planet 🌎 and politics🗳️ through their everyday purchases.
🙏 We’re so excited to be launching on Product Hunt today - major thanks to all who have supported Cluey thus far - our beta testers & early adopters, investors, On Deck community, and friends & family!
Why Cluey?
⏱ Leaving a job before the pandemic left me with plenty of anxious thumb-twiddling in 2020. My coping mechanism of choice as a former journalist and corporate researcher was the opposite of “unplugging” as I ferociously consumed and began researching the myriad of issues we were up against as a society (Covid-19, climate-change, racial justice, the 2020 elections, just to name a few 😵💫).
💸 Above all, I reflected on the outsize impact that corporations have on our society spanning all of those issues, and I began to think about the power that I had in my wallet, and the fact that I gave that power away to companies on a daily basis. Up until this point, my process for discerning which companies I would and would not buy from based on my personal values was disorganized, at times ill-informed, and wasn’t effective at creating change at a larger scale.
💡By recognizing these barriers as an opportunity and leaning into my information and research background, I set off to create a solution. A user-friendly, reliable, and centralized hub where you could quickly identify the impacts of your purchases before you buy based on quality research, identify better alternatives in line with your values, and when acted on collectively in a feedback loop to brands, actually affect big change.
🗳️ So I started small... A prototype launched ahead of the presidential elections to test my hypothesis on whether consumers would change their buying behavior after learning of a company's political contribution history. Turns out, they would ✅
⏩ Fast forward to today, the Cluey team has expanded the corporate impacts we measure beyond just political contributions, to include impacts on people 👥 and the planet 🌎 in addition to other insights interesting to consumers. We aggregate this data from best-in-class third-party sources and make it palatable for the everyday person to understand.
🧨 Put simply - Cluey exists to accelerate the conscious consumer movement.
What are the specifics?
Cluey is a free web platform and Google Chrome extension that makes the social, environmental, and political impacts of consumer brands more transparent.
👥 Create your Cluey profile by indicating the brands you currently buy and the values you care most about.
👀 Discover how your brand impacts add up and make changes.
👍 Tell brands how you feel and influence change by adding your voice alongside others. We power the feedback loop between consumers and brands.
🌐 Download the Google Chrome extension and keep discovering impacts and adding brands to your profile as you surf the web.
What’s Next? 🔜
We’re just getting started and your feedback will impact what we build next. Some immediate features we’re working on include:
🛍️ More brands: We’ll be adding both categories and brands - tell us what we’re missing and we’ll keep that in mind as we expand our database!
🔄 Improving our suggested alternatives by personalizing them to each Cluey Consumer based on their unique values.
We can't wait to hear your feedback, Product Hunters!
🤓 Cluey is available at https://www.clueyconsumer.com/ - we strive to become better and better with each iteration & your feedback will help us do just that.
🙏 Join us, share what you think & let’s build something great together!
Thrilled to be part of this founding team 🎉 Cluey will enable us (individuals) to collectively hold big companies that have massive influence on our society more accountable and enact real change - how can you NOT be excited about that?!
Excited to hear your feedback, Product Hunt, as that's the only way we get better!
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Such a great idea... we keep outraging on social media on various topics, but probably never realised how our day to day spends impacts us when it comes to political change or climate... so happy to see this go live! Hope this goes global very soon and everybody can have access to this transparency! Good luck Maryclaire :)
@andros_wong1 Thank you, Andros! We chose to take a brand-focused approach vs a product-specific approach to help incentivize a feedback loop of improving overall business practices holistically. So happy to hear it resonates!
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Even the most basic insight provided by Cluey is such a game changer! We need more of this in the world!
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