It's back-to-school shopping season — which means it's the busiest time of the year for Impacks, a St. Cloud-based startup that acts as a one-stop virtual shop for parents acquiring school supplies.
Impacks' customized portal page lets parents bundle their purchases of pencils, notebooks and other gear and complete the bulk of their back-to-school shopping in about 30 seconds. The company packs the supplies in boxes and ships them to the schools for families to pick them up.
Parents and schools are noticing, and the company marked nearly 500% revenue growth from 2021 to last year and it’s expanded this year from just Minnesota into eight states across the Upper Midwest.
It's hard to say the status of this year’s growth, but Impacks is “closing deals left and right,” according to CEO and co-founder Clare Richards.
She and her husband Brandon Richards started the concept in 2020, and their plans were immediately dashed as the pandemic struck and schools were shuttered. They did a market test with four schools that year and 12 the next. Last year, they were up to 40 schools, and it was still just the two of them.
Now, she said “2023 will be big, but 2024 is going to be out of this world.” They’ve gone from a 2,000-square-foot warehouse to one with 10,000 square feet, the team has added three full-time sales staffers and four part-time fulfillment staffers and they’re connected to 100 schools.
The National Retail Federation says that back-to-school shopping is the second largest consumer event of the year, following back-to-college spending. The organization found that back-to-school costs keeps rising, with the average household spending about $864 last year, a steep climb from under $697 three years prior. For school supplies alone, that number was about $87 last year, up from $72 in 2019.
“So we're a for-profit company, but we focus a lot on how to positively impact classrooms,” Richards said. In the checkout process, parents can donate to their child’s classroom and the company will match a portion. She said the social impact efforts “are a core element to what we do.”
The company has generated more than $30,000 in donations from parents, community members and the Impacks Donation Match.
Impacks is also facilitating school supply drives to help companies donate to schools that need the most. The startup orders the supplies based on a company’s budget and will either pack the kits in-house or ships them to the organization to let employees or volunteers have a packing event.
The company closed its seed round earlier this year and raised just over $750,000 after $100,000 came from angel investors in 2021.
“Right now, this system is set up to bleed parents dry of their time, of their money,” Richards said. “I think that we really will change how back-to-school shopping is done.”
