VILLAGEx 2022 Founder Friday: Cluey Consumer
Founder Fridays is a series that spotlights VILLAGEx founders and their startups
With the heightened political, cultural, and environmental issues facing society, more consumers are consciously paying close attention to the values in the corporations where they purchase products. For the past several years, founders Maryclaire Manard and Jess Brunelle identified as that group of consumers. Frustrated by the difficulty in finding a brand’s impact across the board, they decided to leave their corporate jobs to create Cluey Consumer, an online site and app that aggregates brands’ impact data so everyday consumers can harness their consumer power to make a difference.
Manard, CEO and founder, started Cluey Consumer in 2020. “I recognized that there was an area that I had a lot of power and was giving that power away on a daily basis to companies who had an outsized impact in our society,” she said. “That power was my consumer power.” Manard started researching the ethical practices, political affiliations, and environmental contributions on the brands she purchased from, but “there was no 'one stop shop’ of super reliable information that I could 100% trust as being true,” she said. As a former journalist and corporate researcher, she decided there needed to be a solution for consumers who wanted accessible, reliable, and aggregated brand information. From that, Cluey Consumer was born.
Brunelle, Manard’s college friend turned startup partner, joined Cluey Consumer in the spring of 2021 as Head of Product Marketing. Having worked in several fast-paced startups before joining Cluey, Jess's past roles focused on the operational and product development side of new business. However, throughout her career, she expressed that she never worked on a product or solved a problem that she personally identified with. Cluey solves “a problem that I think about all the time. When I knew there was no solution to it right now, I was really excited to help build [a solution] from the ground up,” Brunelle said.
In 2022, Manard and Brunelle, now VILLAGEx 2022 founders, are building their team and startup from New Orleans. Currently, they are focusing on growing their brand impact database to include more brands and products across industries. They are also connecting with their user base, which they call the "Clueyverse,” on a daily basis to iterate and continuously improve the ClueyConsumer.com site and Google chrome extension that launched in November 2021.
Q & A
(Responses have been edited for clarity)
How can our consumer power impact the world?
Maryclaire Manard: “We live in a consumer-focused society, and that's just the nature of our current reality. What that means is that we can go through our lives without thinking too much about every action we take within a given day or given time period, but every action we take certainly has an impact. When consumers go to the grocery store or to the mall, they may believe their daily purchases just affect themselves and their wallet. But the reality of the situation is that there is this huge ripple effect where your dollar ultimately goes every time you spend it with an organization and buy from a particular brand over another. If you choose to spend your money locally or with larger brands, it can affect things that you may not even think about, like the company's workers, the climate and the environment, local businesses, supply chains, and factory workers in other countries. It can affect the overall economy as well. So there are so many little things that ultimately create that ripple effect from our everyday actions. I think as consumers, we have been conditioned to forget about all of that. What Cluey wants to do is encourage an informed level of consumerism, so people can realize that something as simple as knowing where your money goes can have a revolutionary impact on the world around you.”
What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
Jess Brunelle: “I think the most important thing is comfort with the unknown. This is not a charted path, and there's no one way to go. So being very comfortable [while keeping] a focused effort on what might come next, but not knowing what comes next. [Entrepreneurs need] comfort with the unknown and an open mind to ideas, the product, and what it turns into. I think those go hand in hand. I would say those are key tenets to entrepreneurship, and being part of a founding team is knowing that it is an untested business model and a totally new space; you have to be creative and open to a lot of possibilities.”
Why New Orleans?
Maryclaire Manard: “I'm so happy to be able to not only start and hopefully grow a company with a mission that I care about personally, but to be able to do it in my home city and grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem of that city. And the community here is dually meaningful for me. So it's not just that we're building Cluey, but also building into the local entrepreneurial spirit. To me, that opportunity is amazing, and is extra motivating for that reason. The other reason for ‘why New Orleans’ is that it takes a lot of resilience to build a startup, and I don't think that there's a city or community that I see as resembling resilience more than the city of New Orleans, for so many obvious reasons. That's something that we want embedded in the cultural DNA of our company as well: that level of resiliency.”
++++
Cluey Consumer empowers consumers to become more informed and conscious of their impacts and influence on people, the planet, and politics. By making brand and corporate impacts transparent, Cluey helps identify which brands are aligned with each consumer’s unique set of personal values so they can buy accordingly.
Cluey is accepting applications for a Senior Software Developer position and highly encourages locals to apply. Email Maryclaire Manard for more information or to submit your resume: maryclaire@clueyconsumer.com