Founding Helpsy
After working on Wall Street for fifteen years, Dan Green felt compelled to redirect his career towards a more meaningful purpose. Teaming up with his two childhood friends, he sought to acquire a used clothing collecting company and improve the conditions of the workers. Green and his co-founders viewed this newfound opportunity as a “vehicle to live our values.” Following extensive negotiations with various company owners, they successfully purchased three companies in Boston, New York, and New Jersey between March and April of 2017. Green explained that his team “put a lot of effort into modernizing these companies, increasing workers' pay, improving the efficiency of the collection process, and being more transparent with our charity parents and landlords.” Over the next four years, Helpsy acquired an additional eight secondhand clothing collecting companies.
Helpsy: Clothes Aren’t Trash
Helpsy is paving the way to a more sustainable future with its strong mission of preventing clothing from ending up in our earth’s landfill. Through its dedicated efforts to collect, sort, and trade secondhand clothing, Helpsy has managed to divert 31 million pounds of clothing, shoes, and other items from ending up in the trash. This equates to approximately 100 items per minute! Additionally, Helpsy’s initiatives have saved nearly six billion gallons of water and approximately 207 million pounds of CO2 emissions from new textile creation.
Helpsy has established its dominance as the largest clothing collection company in the Northeast, with an extensive network of approximately 1,200 collection points spanning from New Hampshire to South Carolina. Whether outside your local grocery store or public school, the chances are you have encountered a Helpsy donation bin!
Inside the Helpsy warehouse, bundles of garments are meticulously organized and tower to the ceiling. Helpsy’s efficient database is used to categorize over 12,000 clothing items each day. A considerable amount of these pieces are distributed to the global secondhand market. Helpsy’s clients include Plato’s Closet, small vintage stores, and sellers on Poshmark and Ebay. Some purchase in bulk, often acquiring 40,000 lbs of clothing at a time. Helpsy is entrusted not to remove the best items, as customers purchase these loads without prior knowledge of their contents. “These are long term relationships,” Green explained. “Some of these buyers have been sent between five and ten million pounds of clothing throughout the years, and we continue to have a strong rapport with them.” In 2022, Helpsy generated over $26 million in revenue.
Helpsy Helps the World
Over the years, Helpsy has donated over 200,000 winter coats to those in need. Green recounted a specific charity event that occurred this past December where Helpsy distributed over 2,000 coats to a middle school in Long Island. He pointed out, “There is the saying, 1% for the planet; but for us it is a significantly higher percentage.”
Green explained that his company’s success comes hand in hand with great responsibility. “We have been so passionate about what we are doing that it has led to us to be very aggressive in how we grow. That, in turn, leads to us never having two nickels thrown together. As soon as we get two nickels, we buy another company, or hire another person, or expand. The company is roughly four times as big in revenue as it was in 2020, which is great. That means that you have a more diverse set of products, and have to worry about inventory and vendors. We are keenly aware that if we make a bad decision, or enough bad decisions, that there are a lot of people counting on us who are not going to get paid, if we do not do it right.”
Mentors and Supporters
Green attributes much of his success to his two partners: “It can be very lonely and you have to make some really difficult decisions sometimes. We would have failed years ago without any one of the three of us.”
Green gives credit to his parents for instilling in him a passion for the environment and a drive to help others: “They have both emphasized responsibility to the community and service as being the ways you should measure yourself. It is a real challenge running a low margin business that deals with a whole gamut of problems. We are essentially sifting through people’s trash, and that is sometimes how we are treated which is hard on our front line workers. It is immensely satisfying to know that what we are doing has a positive impact on our team and the communities we serve.”
Dan’s 3 Tips for Entrepreneurs Interested in Sustainability
“One good thing you need to do is challenge yourself as much as possible. You are going to need to be confident that you understand the numbers when talking to folks, and that you can hold your own in a surprisingly wide set of conversations… The more you challenge yourself, the more fortitude you will have to deal with the challenges thrown at you.”
“You have windows of opportunity to be an entrepreneur and you have to do it when you do not need a paycheck. That first large window is college; you can devote twenty to thirty hours a week to starting a business. I was happiest my senior year of college when I was working seven campus jobs, totaling fifty hours a week.”
“I would cycle through a few businesses and try a bunch of different jobs; you will learn a lot that way. Use this time in college to fail at things in a way to disassociate yourself and your self worth from whether your business succeeded or failed. You are supposed to fail, that is how you learn.”
