Episode 85: Commons: sustainable shopping made easy

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week it’s Earth Month of Action here at Everybody in the Pool showcasing startups and companies that are giving you tangible ways to take meaningful climate action in your own lives. 

And I want to stress that I really MEAN meaningful. We have all been told that individual climate action doesn’t matter and that is, respectfully, some BS. First of all, it lets us off the hook especially those higher income folks who consume the most and emit the most and might be comfortably saying oh I can’t possibly make a difference it’s corporations who have to do things differently. 

Well we are their customers. The signals we send them matter. And it turns out, it doesn’t take much to move the needle. 

But I know it’s not always easy to know WHAT to choose and that gets us to this week’s episode. 

Sanchali Pal

I'm Sanchali Pal, my company is Commons, and we help people take climate action through how they spend money.

Molly Wood

Love it. Tell me more. How does it work?

Sanchali Pal

Commons is an app you can download to buy better and earn rewards, buy from brands that are actually sustainable as expert vetted by our team, and buy less and save money.

Molly Wood

So give me the kind of, let's do the origin story. Tell me how you came to start this and then we'll talk about the evolution of commons.

Sanchali Pal

I really came to this as a consumer, a frustrated data-minded consumer who wanted to buy better and found it too difficult to do so. I've, started all the way when I was in college and I was an economics major and I started wondering about the forces of supply and demand that I was learning about in the classroom. And if my own supply and demand made a difference or if people like me changing our habits and preferences could make a difference at scale. So I started using carbon tracking as a tool.

to understand which were the choices I made that mattered, which ones didn't, what the magnitude of those changes were, and if lots of people did them together, what kind of impact we would have. And so I started really, like I started eating differently. I started eating less meat. I didn't go fully vegetarian. I realized like it's math. If you eat 90 % less meat, you have 90 % of the impact. So I didn't need to be fully vegetarian, but I meat one meal a week. And I've done that for almost 15 years now.

And that has had an impact like taking seven or eight cars off the road just by making that change. Or, you know, I've chosen, I still fly, still get on planes, but I make my choices a little bit differently maybe than someone who didn't think about the carbon impact of my flights. I tend to not take short haul flights because they're super carbon inefficient. If possible, I try to drive or take trains on short trips. So things like that were, so that was sort of like how I got into this was using data to make better decisions that actually mattered at scale.

But what I've realized over time is that we as consumers have the most power by sending a signal to companies through how we shift our spending. And when we shift our spending quickly, even if it's not a lot of us

Sanchali Pal 

It could just be 25%. It causes companies to change their product offerings. And that has a really big impact. And so that's really the direction we've gone on with Commons is using community influence, collective influence to shift company behavior.

Molly Wood

So then tell me how Commons work, what it works, what does the consumer encounter when they get the app and then what can they do?

Sanchali Pal

Cough

Sanchali Pal 

So some people might encounter us first through content. We have Instagram, we have a blog. So if people are searching for sustainable Instagram accounts or looking for how sustainable is a brand that they're buying for, they might come across our brand ratings on the web first. That might be the first place that someone interacts with us. But then if someone wants to download the app, the app is free. You link it to your spending data and you can see.

the emissions behind your spending. You can also earn rewards when you shop at brands that are doing the right thing and learn to save money. We're introducing more of this now of helping people buy less. Like especially one of the things we hear most is people are want to reduce their impulse purchases. They want to buy less from sort of convenience culture and they want to buy longer lasting better things that actually serve them in their life. And so we're really starting to help people do that with challenges, monthly challenges on spending or with brand recommendations and articles.

Molly Wood 

I love it. Longtime followers of Molly will know that I grew up at CNET and this has shades of what I think was my experience through journalism watching the consumer technology space evolve. And as a result, and you and I have talked about this offline, I think that there is a sense

There's a sense and almost a deliberate marketing campaign that says consumers cannot make a difference and that consumers alone can't send these signals. And I think you and I are people who fundamentally disagree with that assessment.

Sanchali Pal 

Yeah, I find that line of reasoning so frustrating and disempowering because it's like telling someone that their vote doesn't matter. It's like, yeah, of course, like one vote is unlikely to make the deciding determination in an election. But if no one voted, then we wouldn't have a democracy or like, you know, many races are won based on thousands of votes that are added up. And so it's similar to that. It's like, yeah, of course.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Sanchali Pal 

You know, one person eating less meat is not going to change the world. But lots of people eating less meat does change company behavior. In fact, it's created a whole plant-based protein industry that didn't exist a decade ago. And so I think that's the sort of either or mentality is really frustrating, especially because the research doesn't support it. The research shows that people who do take more sustainable actions in their life are also more likely to advocate for change in a more systemic way.

Molly Wood 

interesting. So if you can convert people to different sorts of habits, they also become activists. They become evangelists. I bought this thing. I mean, we're all influencers, right? I bought this thing. Or I didn't buy this thing because I found this alternative. Tell your friends.

Sanchali Pal

Yeah.

Sanchali Pal

Exactly, and I think that's a really interesting way of putting it of like influencing is like we all know influencers Are influential right like they change they change how people buy all the time Like you see someone do something on Instagram You see like your friends change their behavior It changes your behavior all of us are changing our behavior all the time or any of us doing the same things we were doing 20 years ago now like the concept of behavior change being hard is Completely incorrect because we all change our behavior

Molly Wood 

Right.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, we would not. I don't know how it has never occurred to me to put this one-to-one together in these exact words, which is we would not have influencer culture or an influencer economy if consumer choices didn't matter. OK, so how, so let's dig into a little bit more of the methodology here, because I know Commons has evolved from the tracking that you mentioned, the financial tracking that you mentioned, which is still part of it, right?

Sanchali Pal 

Absolutely, that is a great point.

Molly Wood 

but to a little bit more buying advice or a lot more.

Sanchali Pal 

Yes, definitely. We've definitely evolved to meet people where they are with buying advice. Like we've realized the place where people want this advice most is, I need a new pair of jeans, but I want them to be more sustainable. Are there options for me that are more sustainable and affordable? And most people stop there because then it's too hard. You like Google it and then it's like paralyzing and you have too many options. So, you know, there's tools that we use in other parts of our lives, like wire cutter reviews, or, you know, there's

movies, we use rotten tomatoes, we use discerning buying advice tools to help us make decisions and lots of other parts of our life. But when it comes to sustainability, there's just never been a good tool for it. Like, help me answer this question. And so that's really why we've built out a lot of our content. Because that's where people often encounter us first. But also, when someone's, you know, if you're in the process of buying something, and you actually make a good choice, we love to be able to close the loop for people. So

you thought about and browsed, you know, what are sustainable jeans? You actually discovered a great new brand through us. Maybe you ended up buying secondhand jeans from Levi's Secondhand, which you didn't know was a thing, but is actually a really robust marketplace and is awesome. Then you bought them and then you had the app, so you actually earned rewards on that purchase. And maybe you were part of our Shop Secondhand challenge. So you inspired all the other people who were part of that challenge to take action too. So I think that's really how we're able to integrate the spend tracking, but it really starts with a simple thing of

I'm trying to get something that I need and how do I get it better?

Molly Wood 

And then what kind of data are you gathering? You're a data nerd. So I know that that's a big part of this. What are you discovering? And also, are you using that data to then influence brands?

Sanchali Pal 

Yes, absolutely. This has been really exciting because we only released the first set of these ratings in November last year of 2024. So it's relatively new, but we are already seeing brands changing their behavior as a result of these ratings. So for instance, let's take the textile industry. We treat every industry differently because what it takes to be sustainable as a clothing company is different than if you're selling cleaning products. So say we started with clothing. We look at the supply chain for that product.

Especially materials and manufacturing when it comes to clothing is the most consequential part of the emissions or the sustainability of that product. So we look at a whole bunch of different factors that are all scraped from publicly accessible data, but might be reported on in different ways. So things like what materials are being used, where are those sourced, are they organic or recycled, are they local, is the manufacturing done with renewable energy. So we take a bunch of these factors related to the supply chain and we come up with a score based on automated

data scraping and then an expert manual review of that information. Then we also look at how is that company helping consumers live more sustainably? A great example is Levi's. They actually scored super well even for their new purchases, you know, obviously even better for their secondhand line, but because they're encouraging people to repair and reuse materials. They have a repair or take back program. They have an on-brand resale platform that makes it really easy for customers to sell back.

They're using responsible email messaging, so they're not promoting impulse purchases or flash sales that encourage people to buy things they don't need. And then the third bucket we look at is how is that company actually changing the industry? Are they advocating for better standards? Are they joining lobbying and trade associations that are supporting improved sustainability? Are they supporting even campaign finance for candidates that are supporting climate policy? Or are they supporting campaign finance for fossil fuel based?

companies. So we incorporate that into their overall sustainability score and it does vary by industry but it holds the same sort of those three main buckets regardless of what industry you're in.

Molly Wood

That is fascinating. That is a lot of research, by the way. This sounds like a really, I mean, I'm assuming that you have templatized this or standardized the research process, but you're going deep.

Sanchali Pal 

It is. It is.

Sanchali Pal 

Yeah, I mean, what's cool is like the reason why this hasn't been done before is because it's hard. And like, there is a lot of data and it's reported on in wildly different ways for different types of brands in different industries, big brands, small brands report on it in different ways. So we've had to be pretty nimble and innovative about how we gather this data using a mix of human gathering and automated gathering, always having manual checks involved in the process because a lot of this isn't reported in standardized ways.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Sanchali Pal 

and also taking this industry by industry approach. But it's been really cool to see with some of the new data tools available today how this can be a lot faster than it used to be.

Molly Wood 

What is the breadth of categories that you're currently researching and advising about?

Sanchali Pal 

Currently, we're focusing on textile-based categories, so clothing, shoes, bedding and linens, those types of things, and chemical-based categories. So we just launched cleaning products. We're working on personal care and beauty next. And those are our most requested categories. So hopefully, with this set, we'll get a lot of what people are buying on a regular basis. But we're also starting to roll out some guidance even in categories where we don't have full reviews out yet, so like tech and books, for instance.

We can at least tell you that shopping secondhand is better than buying new and we can give you some great recommendations for how to do that. So we're starting with areas that are things people are requesting and that are high impact in your purchases.

Molly Wood 

You mentioned some things actually, sort of on that note, you mentioned some things that feel pretty universal, but that are interesting that I don't think people have necessarily thought of. So give us some other examples of kind of red flag behavior. Like you could say about any company, the flash sales thing is fascinating, right? Like what are the behaviors that discourage excessive consumption? I don't think that's something I would have thought about as a consumer, you know, part of the checklist.

Sanchali Pal 

Yeah, I agree. think this has been something that's like, when we take a emissions standpoint, that's where we come from as a company is like understanding where emissions come from at its core. Then you start thinking about like the root cause of environmental impact of an industry is overproduction. And so is a company actually taking meaningful steps to address overconsumption? And that doesn't mean just, you know, there's things in the supply chain that matter. Like are they doing made to order?

manufacturing or are they producing way too much and then they have to dump all the excess stuff that they didn't sell? Or how many fashion cycles are they selling in in a year? Like the Zaras of the world are you know have new styles every week and then they end up over producing and having to dump that. So the frequency of turnover of products on the website is something that we can scrape and we can look at. So that's another one that I think to your point like looking at how many skews or how many products a company sells and how often they turn over, how many seasonal.

items is something that is kind of universal. Like the more evergreen, long-lasting types of products, whether that's, you know, cleaning supplies. Do you need a scent of the year or like a scent of the season every time? Probably not. You could just have like a really nice mellow lemon like the whole year. That would be fine. So that applies to like cleaning products or fast fashion.

Molly Wood 

Hahaha

Molly Wood 

Yeah, it's so interesting. there other brands that, let's like name some names for a minute. Are there other brands that have surprised you to the upside, right? Like we don't have to, I think a lot of us know some of the negatives. We can name and shame if we want to, but like, I didn't know that about Levi's. That's great to know.

Sanchali Pal 

I was so happy to know that, especially being like a Bay Area company. was like, go Levi's. That's awesome. And they've invested in quality since the beginning. It's been something that's been part of their ethos. So that was really awesome to see it come through like empirically in the data as well. I was super impressed by Cotopaxi as well. Really solid work on materials and on repair programs. Things last super long. They have good warranties. These are things that like just as a customer you want.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

okay.

Sanchali Pal 

You want like durable product that lasts a really long time. I like to say like the most sustainable product is the one you'll actually use. So like I do have a $5 t-shirt from H &M that I got in the end of high school. I still wear it. And you know, that's all right. That's great. If you can find like really great affordable basics from somewhere that you know you're going to wear for a long time, that's awesome. That's a reason to buy more affordably. But when the quality is bad, like there is a, maybe I'll just say this, a personal one, Cozy Earth.

I don't know if you ever bought anything from them. They have like bamboo based lounge wear and like sheets. And I had

Molly Wood 

No.

Molly Wood 

Hmm. Which is something that is often held up as a very sustainable choice, to be clear. Uh-huh.

Sanchali Pal 

true. It is. And I always thought of it that way. And a couple years ago, I bought a pair of pants that was really soft and I wear them all the time and they're really, they've held up. I went and bought another pair recently and they ripped like right away. the, the, the thread came out on like the second wash. And then I looked up our rating of them and our rating of them showed that the quality of their materials had degraded over the last few years. And they've actually shifted. Now they're

product mix is not 100 % bamboo or sustainable materials, although there are problems with bamboo in particular. But now they actually include a lot more nylon and polyester-based threads. it's like more than 20 % of it is now not based on the materials they originally advertised on. So those are the kinds of things that like, consumers want to know that just because we want better products.

And so that's something that it's like really great to be able to tell the company, we have an email, the brand button on every brand rating page. So you can email the brand and say, Hey, we really like this thing that you're doing, but we really don't like this other thing you're doing. I'm not going to buy from you right now because I didn't like that.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about how MANY of you need to make the switch to move this ship in a more sustainable direction it’s less than you think and the key to creating the kind of customer demand signals that make companies pay attention. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Sanchali Pal founder of the Commons app 

Molly Wood

Okay, so earlier you mentioned this idea that only 25% of people need to change their behavior. Like, do we come to a methodology and figure out what it really takes to get companies to move? Because that feels really significant, that it doesn't have to be everyone.

Sanchali Pal 

Yeah, this is actually from research from UPenn on what it takes to create a tipping point. And it shows that across the board in a lot of different kinds of social movements, it only takes 25% of people changing.

to actually change for everyone. And I think that's super powerful because often those are the leading indicators that something is about to change and companies pay attention to that. They're very responsive to consumer demand. So if we see that, you know, not only are people shifting their behavior on this platform, right now we have, you know, over a hundred thousand people on Commons are shifting their spending by buying better and buying less, but also they're being vocal about it because then it makes it seem like it's more people than you might think. We've heard this from chief sustainability

officers at companies where they say one of the most powerful tools they have for advocating for budgets or change internally is pointing to customer emails where the customer says, I want this. So they can say like, it's not the sustainability team that's asking for this. This is a business decision. We had an interesting conversation with, I will say like the sustainability team at Everlane where they mentioned that they actually include sustainability in all of their emails. And it's one of their KPIs that they track how well those emails do.

Molly Wood

Mm.

Sanchali Pal 

And so that's, I think those are kind of interesting opportunities for consumer engagement to affect the way company practices happen. Ultimately, companies are only successful if people buy their stuff.

Molly Wood

This is, this feels like another opportunity for the vote metaphor to come into play, which is, I think a lot of people tend to sit around and I am guilty of this too. We sit around and we wish there was a more sustainable thing. Like I don't understand why my local pizza place puts that plastic sticker on the pizza box that makes it not compostable anymore, right? Like I could just email them. And it's, what you're saying is, yes, do that.

Call your congressperson, if you will, like tell the company that you love the sustainable choice or you wish there were one.

Sanchali Pal

I love that example of like your local pizza spot because that's a great place to start. It's like, watch your feedback loop in a small local spot that you care about. If you're a loyal customer somewhere and maybe the owner knows you or like you're there enough, it's like your place you go all the time. Say you want something, say you want like better packaging or you want another vegetarian option on the menu.

Go every time and ask for that when you're there and watch it change and tell like three or four friends who go there to ask for it too and watch it change. I've had this happen all the time at like local places. I go where I'm like, hey, I really love this pasta. Could you make it vegetarian? And they're like, yeah, for sure. And then I do it over the course of like, you know, six months. And then eventually it's like, there's a vegetarian pasta on the menu. Sweet.

That's awesome, because maybe I wasn't the only person doing that and they've realized that there's enough demand for it. And that just changed significantly. If you're thinking about like a restaurant buying food for thousands of people dining there over the course of a month and they've changed their purchase order in bulk, that's a meaningful impact.

Molly Wood 

It's a big deal. Yes. Like I just, why did we give all our power away as consumers? why, you know, why did we get so despairing when we, when I actually was just reading an article about the history of protest and dissidence. And one of the things that the article pointed out is that historically economic protest and refusal to participate has been the thing that precipitates.

Sanchali Pal 

You

Sanchali Pal 

Hmm.

Molly Wood 

significant change. That protests in the streets are valuable, but at the end of the day when when all the consumers went on a general strike or when economic activity was withheld, that's what actually pushed change over the line.

Sanchali Pal 

That is such a helpful reminder because especially today, it can feel like things have always been this way, but they really haven't. It's like very new that we have the type of economic system we have. And it's helpful to remind ourselves that like, yeah, just like a few decades ago, this was a really common tool we used for change and it worked. Like in 1970, we actually lived within the Earth's means.

It was like the amount of resources we used over the course of a year did not surpass the amount of resources that the earth could produce in a year. And now we use five times that. So it's like these things have been created in our own lifetimes. Over half of human caused emissions have been emitted since the year I was born. Like this is super recent.

Molly Wood 

We have gotten used to, and by we, mean shareholders and companies have gotten used to a degree of consumption.

big part of the messaging here like yes, there's a huge replacement cycle there really is buy better versions of the stuff that you have now but at the end of the day the goal is less and What are the the economic tensions inherent in that messaging for you even as a startup?

Sanchali Pal 

Yeah, it's true. mean, I think there's kind of a, there's a feeling that we can't have less because we're always growing. Like, I feel like that's a, that is an assumption people make is like, we need to grow, we need to buy more stuff, companies need to grow, our economy is growing. That means more things. And that's not true. That's not how it has to be. We can get the things we need and probably be happier, work less, have more wealth if we don't buy as many things. But I think that that's like on the personal level, I feel like it's easier to understand. you know, people feel like I want less stuff in my house. I want it to feel lighter. I want to buy fewer things. I want to have things that like maybe I actually love and treasure and I repair and I get to keep over time. Or I want to borrow things with my friends and neighbors and my community. Like I want to use my buy nothing group. I want to, you know, share the things I have. So I think there's a lot of like reclamation of community and of of treasured possessions and resources that's happening right now, which is really cool to see.

But then there's also the like curbing of our impulse purchases and our like questioning of what we think we need versus what we really need. But I feel like the harder question to me for like conceptualizing this is how does this work like at the economy level or with companies? How do companies sustain if they're not actually selling people more stuff? We actually just talked about this in our first episode of our new podcast season, Second Nature, where we talk about, you have ethical consumption under?

capitalism and we talked to this economist actually Juliette Shor who has done a lot of the research on tipping points and why it matters to change consumption. But one of the big things that I took away from that conversation is that

Sanchali Pal 

Growing doesn't necessarily mean producing new things out of new materials. I think there's a lot of what we need that we already have. And if we think more carefully about sustainable design at the start of manufacturing and thinking about the end of life as all part of the same cycle, there's a really interesting modular computer company called Framework that's becoming really popular where you build your own PC or laptop.

And then you can strip down and replace parts. So you're not constantly buying new things, but you have to think about that type of design from the start. And then you can build a company off of successful growth with that supply chain. But it really, think it really does require re-imagining the way we do business. And some companies are not going to be able to change. And maybe they're not going to survive in that new mode of being.

Molly Wood

Who are you finding is wanting to do this the most? Like we keep hearing that, know, Gen Z is most interested in shopping sustainably. Are you finding that to be the case? What are, you know, what are the demographics that jump out at you in terms of who's looking for this information and wants to consume differently?

Sanchali Pal 

We do tend to see most resonance with Gen Z and millennial audiences. Folks under the age of 35 in particular tend to engage with our materials the most. And these are folks who are also interested in saving money, more interested to shop secondhand, more interested in getting rewards for their purchases. But we're also starting to see more demographics like parents who have to buy a lot of stuff and are worried about the future of the earth and life on earth for their children who are going to be here longer than them. And so parents are definitely a big demographic for us. Basically, people have to buy a lot of shit and are overwhelmed by those types of decisions, just want a tool to make it easier.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Sanchali Pal 

So like even when people move houses, we're like, are trying to think about a new phase of life. Like that tends to be a time when we see people are thinking about this more. but yeah, I would love to see this be more intergenerational because I think there is like so much that, you know, our grandparents' generation or parents' generation did differently from how we did. and we can actually learn a lot from that. Like my grandparents used all cloth diapers. They weren't sustainability warriors. were just, it was like a reality of.

life and we've gotten really used to the convenience culture so we don't do that anymore. But I do think there's like a lot of benefit to doing this with people of different ages.

Molly Wood 

And then the last question I was going to ask is really just about, again, consumer behavior and the signals that it sends. We are in a moment of retreat from climate goals at the corporate level because it's not politically popular. I think we're also, though, at a moment when it's sort of like a narrative change. But companies do, the companies who are paying attention, I think, do understand that this is where business is headed.

And it would seem to me that that makes comments even more powerful and consumer behavior even more powerful at this exact time.

Sanchali Pal 

We're at such a pivotal moment right now in terms of what we choose in our culture and what we want to be part of the fabric of what we value in the next phase. And I do think consumers and companies are even more critical right now to send that signal that this is going to be a way of our life.

We want to live in a way that is able to sustain life on earth. And we want to do that in a way that's better for us too. That's healthier, less microplastics, less toxic chemicals. We want more community. Those are the things that people actually value and companies need. What we can do is we can give companies cover to care about that. And I think that's super powerful right now is like.

Yeah, can tell Levi's we love that you're doing that secondhand program. I want to get cheaper jeans and I want to be able to sell back the jeans that I'm not using anymore. Please keep doing that. I want to support this part of your company. so Levi's doesn't have to make an ethical argument necessarily to even support that. They're just saying my customers want this. And that's, think, a really, really important role of consumers in today's market is to give companies the cover to make choices that are better for all of us.

Molly Wood 

Yep. You matter, consumer. We matter. Santali Pal, where can people find comments?

Sanchali Pal 

Matter so much, yes. You can download Commons in the App Store or on the Play Store and it's free, so check it out.

Molly Wood 

Love it. Thank you so much for the time today. I appreciate it.

Sanchali Pal 

Thanks. I should, should I, is it okay to also plug our website and Instagram? Okay. Okay. You can also find us on Instagram at commons earth and on the web at the commons dot earth.

Sanchali Pal

Thank you so much.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Next week we’ll be talking about one of the biggest ways to make climate change in your personal life  food and I’m gonna try a fancy chocolate. 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. Together we can get this done! See you next week.