From left: Landon Brand, Mimi Tran Zambetti and Ben Stanfield. They met at USC and pivoted to Wren ... [+]
When Landon Brand, Ben Stanfield and Mimi Tran Zambetti were brainstorming ideas for their second startup venture, one phrase was scribbled on the whiteboard in all caps: “CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The trio, who met through USC’s Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, were originally working on HR software when they changed direction. But they weren’t climate scientists, environmental scientists or politicians. They were designers and engineers—so they began looking for a way to create a product for consumers. “There are tons of people out there like us that want to do something about this,” Stanfield told Forbes. “Can we set up some sort of software to help connect them with projects they can get involved with?”
Their solution became Wren, a subscription service that offsets an individual’s carbon footprint. When a customer signs up, they share their transportation, diet, services and energy usage, which Wren uses to calculate their carbon footprint. Then, they pay a monthly charge to offset what they emit, for an average of about $21 a month. That money goes to one of three projects: tree planting, Amazon rainforest protection or clean energy for Ugandan refugees. Wren updates its subscribers every two weeks on the projects.
Wren's carbon calculator uses data from University of California Berkeley’s Cool Climate project and ... [+]
The company partners with already established organizations to complete the projects. Instead of offering dozens of projects like its competitors do, Stanfield says, the team chose three that can be scaled up easily as the company gets more customers. The tree planting, for example, is done with the the International Small Group & Tree Planting Program (TIST), which provides funding and seeds for communities of farmers in Africa and has already planted millions of trees. TIST already has practices to carefully track tree growth, information Wren is able to pass on to its subscribers through visuals like gifs. The other projects are spearheaded by Mandulis Energy and the Rainforest Foundation, an organization that helps Peruvians monitor illegal deforestation, a practice experts have pointed to as a likely cause of the Amazonian fires in Brazil.
Over 500 people have become Wren subscribers since the Y Combinator startup launched in June. These subscribers are passionate and often send in paragraphs of feedback, the founders say. One customer, a hostel owner in Europe, asked for fliers to encourage guests to sign up for Wren. Stanfield received an email from a woman who said she had a dream about climate change and was so distressed that she woke up in the middle of the night. Then her husband rolled over and asked if she heard of Wren. She signed up the next day.
The young founders—Brand and Stanfield are 22, while Tran Zambetti is 20—were surprised by the response. The model for trading carbon credits was designed for businesses, which don’t necessarily care about the details of a project, Stanfield says. But consumers do, and want transparency, story and personal connection. “It’s how you craft the right community and environment for individuals to actually feel like they’re making a difference to climate change, and provide a really easy on-ramp to get them started.”
Even though Wren is targeted toward individuals, the founders are also making it easy for companies to enroll their employees. Six companies have signed up that plan to offer Wren as an employee benefit. And despite wanting to initially focus on U.S. customers, Wren opened itself up internationally due to demand.
Wren’s founders hope the platform’s transparency and accessibility makes it easy for people to see how they can impact climate change as individuals. Many people have also been intrigued by Wren’s decision to position itself to investors and grow the company through venture capital, a path few of its competitors are taking. But the founders are doing this to scale as quickly as possible, and “want to be focused on impact as the bottom line,” Stanfield says.
“Before we had pivoted, we were like, ‘What do we want to have done before we are 30 years old?’” Stanfield says. “For all of us, it was climate change. And now we have this opportunity.”
Clarification: This post has been updated with the information Wren uses to calculate the carbon footprint of their customers.
