Dexter and Byron Peart, cofounders, Goodee

What is Goodee?

Byron Peart: It is a trustworthy lifestyle destination for good design and good purpose, a place for timeless and essential products made with a sustainable approach. We want to change the narrative of organic and sustainable consumer purchases as being a trade-off against owning beautiful things. We felt like there needed to be a more modern approach to sustainability, to present it in a more appealing, digestible way

How will consumer engagement with Goodee differ to engagement with other e-commerce platforms?

Dexter Peart: We don’t just want people to shop, we want to cultivate a purpose-driven conversation. People now want to make better choices in their lives and we have created an opportunity for people to engage. Goodee is a platform and a brand and it collects the stories of these makers. Instead of every company moving in silos, doing their little bit, Goodee puts all these people together on our one platform, to create change, to create a community, to create a movement.

Byron Peart: The brands showcased on Goodee will all become part of our community. Goodee is cross-collaborative and celebrates good makers rather than being a top-down thing curated by Dexter and myself—brands such as EcoBirdy, which makes kids’ furniture from waste plastic toys. Spanish textile brand Teixidors is also making an impactful change. Over half the Teixidors workforce have learning difficulties.

As Goodee is an e-commerce platform, why is it so important to have a physical presence?

Dexter Peart: Goodee needs a gathering space in the real world because we are championing human stories.

Byron Peart: The conversation is also about slower living and this physical retail touchpoint is a calm environment to have these conversations in a localized way. Goodee will be on the road and will move approximately every three months, so that on a global level and a hyper-local level, we can cultivate local communities. Inside the current space, for example, people are welcomed in, as if into a home, and there are events with different guests. It is a multimedia cultural space where ideas are happening daily.

From a more general retail lens, physical department stores, for example, once a place where people would find curated things from around the world, have abdicated the responsibility where they created platforms for design to be celebrated. E-commerce is part of that shift. E-commerce sites are places where everything is available to everyone, at every price. But people will continue to buy things and we asked ourselves how we could help people make good choices and create a curated environment. The answer was a digital and physical space that is in line with the modern consumer conversation, that ties in with modern consumer choices.