Miigle Using AI to Become the Amazon for Social Impact Products

All over the world, there are passionate brands that are working to fight hunger, protect animal rights, preserve the environment and more. Meet Miigle+, its mission is to help you find those brands, effortlessly. Miigle+ is an AI-enabled app that helps you discover, shop and support social impact products and sustainable brands making the world a better place whether you’re shopping online or in a store… any store!

Below is a Q&A with the inspirational founder of Miigle+, Luc Berlin

What is the first reaction you get when telling people about Miigle?

The first reaction people get is prolonged excitement and the desire to get involved! They’ll say “That’s so cool! I’d love to use something like that.” or “I want to shop consciously but I never know which brands to go for.” That reaction indicates that people want to / can get excited about shopping ethically but don’t have the time to go out of their way to make it happen. They love the fact that Miigle can automatically show them brands to consider for the products they want without requiring any work on their part. They also really like the idea of our brand directory where they can more casually browse brands for a specific product category they might be looking for. Overall a one-stop-shop for ethical shopping layered with a technology that can make recommendations of brands or products to consider has been very appealing to people we’ve talked to so far.

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Why do you think it is so hard for consumers to find ethical and conscious brands?

It’s hard for consumers to find ethical and conscious brands because these brands are typically smaller and don’t have the marketing budgets to compete against the bigger traditional brands and rise above the noise. That’s essentially because they are relying on the same saturated marketing channels as traditional brands where as Miigle provides a direct marketing channels solely for socially conscious brands and consumers. Additionally, the business models of current marketing channels are primarily “pay-for-play” so for an up-and-coming brand who hasn’t quite got the revenue to fuel their marketing it can be very hard and for many a losing proposition before they’ve even began.The analogy I give is being short in rent money and walking into a casino with your last paycheck of the month, hoping to win enough to cover the full rent. There’s a chance you may win but in most likelihood you will not. In contrast, Miigle’s business model is primarily built on a revenue share with very little upfront cost which provides a level playing field for social good brands big or small, especially small.

We love how the consumer has all the power in saying what products to buy with Miigle. Give us an overview of how Miigle works with “upvoting”.

There’re actually a few different ways that we sought to empower consumers through Miigle. From the onset, we wanted Miigle to be a social platform, we believe the strength of the social good, eco-friendly or sustainable movement is people so it is extremely important for us to have a community at the core of our vision. For example, we define our marketplace and platform as socially curated, meaning anyone and everyone can suggest social good brands or products that they would love to see on the platform. The simple truth is that we are not clairvoyant and there’s only so much info we can get from the Internet (it took us 6 months to put together our director of 350 brands and I’m sure there are hundreds more we’ve not yet discovered) so if there are brands out there in the world building amazing products and positively impacting the lives of people and/or our planet in the process we wanted to give people the opportunity to inform us as well as the rest of the world of those brands.Upvoting is one such feature that essentially translates to people placing their vote of confidence or approval on a specific brand and/or product. When members of our community upvote a product, it’s because they’ve used and liked it or love the principles upon which a brand operates. Upvoted products are then shared as Trending Products for a period of time so they can get more visibility amongst the entire community.

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Give us an overview of the benefits of joining Miigle as a brand.

There are many benefits to joining Miigle as a brand but the most important is that there’s finally a technology, in Miigle+, that’s dedicated to getting social good brands’ products in front of their target audience which are ethically conscious consumers. Secondly, through Miigle’s marketing channel, social good brands don’t have to worry about competing with traditional brands. Additionally, our business model is not pay-for-play, meaning we don’t charge cost-per-clicks or cost-per-impressions which put a big financial burden on brands because they’re paying for someone to simply come to their site. There’s no guarantee of that person converting but they’d have to pay the cost regardless.

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In contrast, Miigle’s revenue is primarily generated when someone actually buys our brand partners’ products. This significantly lowers the barrier of entry especially for up-and-coming brands that may not have big or any marketing budgets. Finally, by partnering with us and being listed on our Browser Extension, brands can benefit from searches made on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing even if they are not advertising on those platforms as well as people shopping on nearly any e-commerce site including Amazon, Wal-Mart, Macy’s and others.

Why #buysocialgood?

#BuySocialGood is the hashtag of our mission which is to turn 100% of consumerism into cause-surism.

The goal of #BuySocialGood is to raise awareness among the public of the importance of leveraging our purchasing power to buy from and support social good brands but also to incentivize traditional brands to adopt a social good business model. We believe that the challenge of building a better planet for all becomes a bit easier when we bring as many people and brands into the fold. It needs to be about inclusiveness and a genuine care to do good, not PR stunts, marketing ploys or brand name bashing.