Several years ago, I was at the Hong Kong Premium Corporate Gift Fair, a massive fair where thousands of companies were offering plastic pens and USB sticks for corporate gifting purposes. A market worth US 40B (pre-COVID)!

Realizing that many corporate gifts are thrown away probably the same day they are gifted and end up finally in landfills, I thought we needed to develop a better value proposition, that also helps Mother Nature.

Corporate gifting is essential and should create a lasting bond between company and customer, but the plastic pen and USB stick are not the answer anymore; customers are becoming more critical of a company’s sustainability journey.

After a good bottle of wine, maybe two, I came up with the idea to enable companies to gift trees. But how to do that? With my background in technology, though being a lousy engineer, I thought technology should be the answer.

After we built our first Minimum Viable Product (MVP), we got some interest and traction from customers. Compared to what we offer now, our MVP was very minimal indeed! 

Believing in the cause, keeping operating costs low, and diligently working with the technology team in Bandung, we have not only built a world-class technology platform; we now partner with 15 foundations planting trees, have 40,000 active users on our platform, and are privileged to be working with amazing customers like Etihad Airways, Procter and Gamble, S&P Global, and many more. And our customers not only use trees for corporate gifting, they also use trees for loyalty, rewards, employee engagement, and transparent carbon offsetting programs.

And this is only the beginning. EcoMatcher is accelerating on all fronts. Our technology platform gets better, more feature-rich, more secure and robust, and faster; we are adding more tree planting foundations to our platform, offering our customers more choice, and having some fantastic new customer partnerships in the pipeline, besides the amazing ones we already have.

Combating the climate crisis is a collective effort. EcoMatcher wants and will be part of this!