Five years after funneling their life savings into their startup, a local couple has a $2 million company in Carrboro with ambitions to grow.
Cayley Pater and Andy Ives met at UNC-Chapel Hill 17 years ago, long before getting married and starting Made Trade – an e-commerce software startup dealing in sustainably-sourced products.
It was a meet-cute setting that would become prescient – the pair met at the semester’s first meeting of the UNC Fair Trade Club and bonded over efforts to get fair trade coffee and fair trade chocolate on campus.
After graduation and “seeking a change,” they moved to Portland, Oregon, where Pater worked at a nonprofit that dealt with artisans in the Middle East and Ives worked in digital advertising. But, while building a life together, they realized that it was hard to find products aligned with the values that brought them together in the first place.
“We started buying things for our home,” Ives said. But finding products – from home goods to clothing – that were not “mass produced” was complicated. They had to scour markets and individual sellers.
“We were really looking for a one-stop shop that curated beautiful designed products made with transparency,” Pater said. “We found it didn’t exist.”
So they created one – partnering with 135 ethical and sustainable brands “that we verify and vet.”
Ives describes Made Trade as an “ethical and sustainable alternative to Anthropologie,” targeting millennials and Gen-Z customers. In 2020, as the pandemic was raging, they moved home to the Triangle, taking their remotely-operated company with them.
This month, Carrboro-based Made Trade’s first funder – a convertible note seed round – was disclosed in a securities filing. As of the filing, $200,000 of a planned $1.5 million had been closed from a single investor. The money will go toward building brand awareness – the next step in Made Trade’s growth strategy.
The initial focus will be on influencer marketing and word of mouth, Pater said.
Prior to the raise, the company, which has about $2 million in annual revenue, was bootstrapped. The couple estimates they invested about $160,000 of their own savings – as well as some financing from the Small Business Association’s Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.
“We took it as far as we could,” Pater said. “We’re at the point now where that outside capital is really what we need.”
Right now, the firm is exclusively online, though Pater said the plan is to someday create a brick-and-mortar presence, starting with pop-up shops in key markets. A goal is to have a shop in the Triangle.
Pater and Ives aren't the only married entrepreneurs going all in on a startup – and returning to their college town in the process. A pair of now-married Duke University grads founded crochet startup The Woobles, which recently turned down an investment offer they won on "Shark Tank." Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang left careers at Google and Wall Street to start the company during the pandemic.