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Building the Sustainability Layer: How EcoCart is Creating a New E-commerce Category

The line between “nice-to-have” and “must-have” is where category-defining companies are born. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dane Baker, CEO and Co-founder of EcoCart, revealed how his team is building what could become the standard sustainability layer for e-commerce, growing from zero to over 2000 brands in under four years.

The journey to category creation started with a failed attempt at sustainability. Before EcoCart, Dane had founded an online peer-to-peer rental marketplace for outdoor gear. “The general hypothesis was we could limit consumption in the world by amplifying the sharing economy, especially with high plastic items,” he explains. But maintaining sustainability practices proved challenging: “As we scaled, however, it became very difficult and quite expensive to maintain that sustainability ethos as a company. We tried everything, tried to buy offsets, hire consultants. It’s very complicated and it was very expensive.”

This firsthand experience with the complexity of implementing sustainability practices became the foundation for EcoCart’s value proposition. As Dane notes, “The problem that we’re solving is, for businesses, it’s incredibly complicated and expensive to take steps towards operating sustainably.”

What’s particularly interesting about EcoCart’s go-to-market approach is their focus on organic growth rather than traditional outbound sales. “A lot of our growth has come organically because we do a good job of telling that story in an authentic way that resonates,” Dane explains. “Most of our brands and partners come to us organically… directly through search and searching in search engines, as well as directly into things like a Shopify App Store.”

This organic-first strategy stems from strong market demand rather than push. Instead of convincing brands about sustainability, EcoCart positions itself at key points of intent. As Dane puts it, “All we try to do is help to accelerate that and amplify that and be in that place of intent.”

The company’s approach to category creation involves significant education. “First and foremost, a lot of the work that we do is education,” Dane shares. “We are creating a category. We are educating our potential partners on the importance of doing this work and also what this work means.” This education-first approach helps establish EcoCart as the de facto solution in an emerging space.

What’s remarkable about their GTM motion is how they’ve managed to craft a unified value proposition that resonates across different market segments. When asked about messaging to different types of brands, from DTC disruptors to established retailers like Walmart, Dane explains, “The beautiful thing about what we’re doing is that the message is the same because the value proposition is the same.”

Their timing also plays a crucial role in their GTM success. As Dane describes it, “We’re in this golden era between sustainability being a sort of nice to have solution to an absolutely must have.” This market timing allows them to shape the category while demand is growing but before the space becomes overcrowded.

Looking ahead, Dane sees their product becoming ubiquitous in e-commerce: “We believe what we’re building is becoming ubiquitous and standard in the e-commerce landscape. And that in five years from now, looking forward, you and I, as consumers, won’t be able to go through a checkout experience and not have an option to make our purchase carbon neutral.”

For founders building new categories, EcoCart’s approach offers valuable lessons in organic growth, market timing, and consistent messaging. But perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates how solving your own pain point can lead to category creation – if that pain point is shared widely enough across the market.