Transparenz – Wie man ökologisch sinnvolle Kaufentscheidungen beim Online-Shopping fördert

0:03 Hallo Welt, liebe Menschen, herzlich willkommen bei unserem Software for Future Podcast. Mein Name ist Friederike Löwe und gleich hörst du auch Nils Löwe. Wir führen als Unternehmerpaar die Lionizers. Diesmal gibt es ein englisches Interview, ausnahmsweise, mit Antoine Verger von Jog. Jog bietet Online-Shop-BetreiberInnen einen Algorithmus, der für jeden Artikel einen CO2-Fußabdruck berechnet, der dann angezeigt und nach Wunsch auch kompensiert werden kann. Bist du gespannt? Dann los!

0:44 Ja, warm welcome to Antoine. This is our first English episode. I hope it's okay for everyone listening here. Antoine, we've met many years ago when I was working for a different company and you were working for a different company. Now you are running your own company, doing sustainability tech. You can describe it much, much more better. Who are you? What do you do?

1:13 Sure. Thanks, Nils, for having me on board today. And thanks for switching languages as an exception. I think German would be more funny than serious, the talk. So, yeah, I'm Antoine, born and raised in France, Antoine Verger. Long story how I happened to be in Germany the last 10 years. I will try to wrap it up very briefly. I studied mathematics and computer science back in France, 2005. und ich nicht sicher was ich was zu tun. Ich war sehr attracted by research, so fundamental research, which was pretty much pushed by the teachers in the master degree I did in France. A lot of very interesting topics in research, but not much cash there for making a living out of that. So I decided to go to the industry, Ich habe in der Telekom in France gearbeitet.

2:24 Orange Telekom als Software Developer. Eine sehr interessante Geschichte, weil ich war für einigen Unternehmen in France. Das war die only... Wenn du in der Universität nach deinem Studie hast, du hast Und du hast du für die Agenzies, Basically, they have those big agencies, Logica and Steria and so forth. And they were basically sending you to customers or putting you on a project as a senior developer. And then you had to make up appearances. And so I ended up at Orange Telecom as a senior PHP developer, though I probably did like one or two projects in PHP. And I just got started this way and I had to learn on the fly. But it was a very interesting experience. because I had to rotate among many roles within this client.

3:28 And I learned a lot, moved from software developer to scrum master to product owner. So I really rotated what makes, at the end, a product team, except the designer part, which might be better. But in this very first project as a professional, I've seen many aspects of what is needed to build a digital product for the best and the worst because of course I was lacking experience so made a lot of mistakes but very teaching first experience and then I moved to Germany somewhere 10 years ago starting from scratch again didn't speak English, didn't speak German by the time and started again as a developer and quickly moved to other part of again product development I think I'm always very tempted by not staying in one area and exploring other areas.

4:26 Also feeling that you have more leverage sometimes when you are not coding and you are more on the product side. Maybe also the frustration that everyone might have experienced as a developer with the, I don't know, shitty product owner that you don't feel connected to. And then you think you can do a better job and you realize, okay, actually product is also hard. And then you go back to development. So I did this, I think someone found a name for that. It's like something like a pendulum where you always go back from one place to another, trying to find where you fit and where you help at most. And yeah, in Germany, work for an agency again, two, three years, and then move to the e-commerce sphere at Otto.

5:10 Always careful how I pronunciate that. Otto, the German family-owned e-commerce business. I work for their startup incubator, like a corporate incubator. Very interesting area and very interesting times. It was called Liquid Labs. It was run by two American guys, Paul and Michael. And basically there, what we were doing is gathering ideas within the Otto group about businesses that are not specifically about e-commerce, but maybe side activities, logistics, finance, and so forth. And out of those ideas that were growing within this gigantic corporate, trying to build businesses out of that, that could be independent companies at the end. So it was the best of both world, corporate and startup, because you had the safety of corporate while having the thrill of building something out of the ground but at the same time also downside of being corporate, right? Things are not moving as fast as in the startup world sometimes but it was very interesting because I really greenfield projects and I think we've met by this time where we were also growing teams and structuring teams and out of this experience I think I spent probably five, six years at Liquid Labs I've seen probably six, seven businesses, some that just lasted three months because no product market fit, to some that now are companies with more than 50, 60 employees.

6:53 No unicorn though there, but at least businesses are now at this stage after so many years sustainable, I would say, on the financials. And there are also rotated roles. Developer, bad developer, I would say, because how good can you get if you are not touching the keyboard on a regular basis? And then product owner. And at the very end of this time at Liquid Labs, I got the chance to take the CTO role at one of the companies that Liquid Labs purchased by the time, which was called FitFox, with the vision of being a booking.com for sport activities. So if you want to run a marathon or book a ticket for a fitness studio or a month subscription for a fitness studio, you could go on Fitfox and see what's available and purchase your tickets there.

7:43 And it was a long time ago before Urban Sports Club was there. So it was very early stage of this sport tech area and very rich experience because there I was for the first time really owning and running the business, not owning, but running the business. The company was owned by Sportcheck and Otto. And grew the team from three, let's say, late founders to a team of 40 people. And it was pre-COVID and then COVID came in. And then sport was not really possible anymore. Indoor, outdoor, everything was down. So I also experienced how you can go from very fast growing company to almost zero in a couple of weeks. And yeah, by that time, I think that's also good to correlate that with the time where climate change started to be an important topic to me.

8:42 It was probably during that time at Firefox 2017, I would say, where I really realized that there is something big coming. And that's the most urgent topic that needs to be addressed. That came through readings and that came from informing myself. And yeah, it was a shock, I think, for everyone who had that experience. You go through different phases, probably shock, sadness, anger, acceptance. Das sind die Dinge, die Try to, by that time, to address the problem on the personal level first. Trying to see what I can do on my own to act. Which I did. Like I changed my habits about commuting, eating, electricity at home. Like all the things you can do at your personal level. And then there is a point where you say, okay, what can I do aside of my personal actions?

10:08 And then is it possible to do that through my job and my work? And I remember meeting some people by that time to try to see, okay, we're techies. You know, techies, they can do everything, but can they do something about that? And it's hard, right? It's really hard to see what you can do with your skills and realizing that tech is a powerful tool, but how can that help changing or stopping climate change and reducing carbon emissions, for example. So that was a ride back then, 2017. Es ist ein processer, ich glaube, es hat mich drei Jahre, zwischen dem Zeitpunkt ich erst herausgekommen, dass Klima-Change etwas ist. Ich habe Juk, das ist

11:12 about tech and sustainability?

11:15 I was looking for something. Sustainability and tech was really hard to find something. I was quite desperate to find the sweet spot of where I could bring my skills and help fighting climate change. And I was almost like, I almost decided, okay, it's not going to happen, so I'm going to do something else. When I actually, through a technical network, met my co-founder of Arena, She actually was working already, Verena Junge, she was already working for Sustainability Company. She was Managing Director at Anyway, which is a peer-to-peer energy provider. So you can purchase your electricity from someone in Schleswig-Holstein that has like a windmill in his garden. That was the vision, like trying to build those peer-to-peer network.

12:10 And she had a long history of sustainability and climate protection. And she was an ex-Greenpeace activist and she worked at Leashbleek. And then at Anyway. So she had definitely the background, which I didn't have except my readings. And I think Varana described the process in other podcasts pretty well. That was a very long recruiting process because she wanted to make sure she found the right partner for building the company. The company already existed, so I joined a bit after, I don't know, two, three months after the GmbHR was created. And I was at the very beginning of COVID, so we met on the outside and we walked and took like a couple of weeks until we finally said, okay, now that's the team we want us to build Uke.

13:00 And if we look at the vision, which is still the same as in 2020, the vision was to bring climate action in commerce and consume. That's vague, but it's vision. So vision needs to be vague or large enough to cover the entire area of consume. If you look at Germany and your and mine personal carbon emissions, one third is consumed. And it excludes food. It's really just consumed and services. And that's absolutely not tackled at the moment. So electricity, it's tackled, right? You know, if you want to reduce your emissions, you have to move to renewable energy. For transport, you know, you have to take more train, less car, less plane. for food you know you have to change your diet you have to eat less meat less dairy but for consume what can you do right and that's where we thought we have a card to play and we started this way so in 2020 the first thing we did is we wanted to see how B2C customers are reacting to climate action and we had some study data about the fact that 70% of the people would like to do something about climate action while they're purchasing.

14:30 That's the study data. It always diverts from what people really do at the end. But that's how we got started. And we decided to build plugins for shop systems to add this very small checkbox at the checkout to say, okay, for X euros, you can compensate your emissions. Das ist etwas, dass man sich in Airlines oder in online shops. Back in 2020, nicht so many waren. Zalando war das. Aber heute haben Auto, Zalando ist das. Und man sieht es mehr und mehr, die kleine checkboxen, die sich über die Worte zu compensieren, die die Emissions-Auskosten zu verändern. So wir begannen das so. Wir lernen ein viel. Wir haben ein paar Shops. We sometimes were surprised positively by how much people are willing to do something and really doing that.

15:31 Because there is, you know, there is the wish of doing that and there is actually dipping in. And that's what kept us busy 2020 and 2021. And then we realized, okay, if you want to offer climate contribution at the checkout, you actually have to calculate what's in the basket. and you have to bring transparency in the products that are there and through doing those explorations which are at the end of our product discovery we realize okay maybe the product, the real product is not this contribution it's more about bringing transparency about what you purchase and that's where we're staying now, right?

16:10 Ah cool, yeah I just wanted to ask so how do you calculate these emissions? So because when I fly from here to London I know there is a plane, it has that much of emission, I am one of, I don't know how many people, so it's easy to calculate and do you so let's say I buy 10 t-shirts on a large online shop so is it only transportation or what do I compensate and if it's for the t-shirts How do you measure the emissions for that T-shirt? Yeah, it depends.

16:55 And it depends mainly on what data is available on the merchant side or on the brand side. So brands tend to have more data than online shops because they have the source. They hopefully know their supply chain. But let's take the example of OnlineShop, which at the end or Marketplace, where the data is not first-party data. It's only what you got from the manufacturer and sometimes very partial data and not well-structured. So the first thing we do is we try to get what we need from this data, cleaning up, extracting, enriching, parsing all this data. And then how we calculate that we are... using a lot of public or paid databases about what are the emissions of different parts of the product.

17:54 So let's zoom out. So what we do is we look at, it was your original question, we look at the material that are used for building this product or manufacturing this product. We look at the manufacturing process. We look at transport. And usually what you do, if you want to have the footprint of a product, You have different scopes. You have manufacturing and production and distribution. It's called cradle to gate. And then you have two extra cycles that are usually out of this scope, which is gate to grave, and it's like usage and end of life. So what makes an entire life cycle of a product is manufacturing and extraction of materials, distribution, usage and end of life usage and end of life is really hard because it really depends how you actually treat your t-shirts, are you washing your t-shirts every day or only once a week with cold water or warm water and what's your washing machine, what kind of electricity are you using, it's very hard, like usage is very hard, so that's why it's usually not used or at least we are having a tough time to use it the error margin is so huge that it might not make sense.

19:12 And end of life is also hard because what are you doing with your T-shirt? Are you reselling them on the secondhand shop or are you recycling them or are you just putting them in your normal trash, right?

19:25 So we're, yeah. I believe that that depends a lot on the product. So if I have a car or even if it's an electric car, So then usage, you can't measure it to the last detail, but at least you know I have a power consumption of that much per 100 kilometers. Exactly.

19:50 So there are some devices like electronic devices or fossil fuel energies, vehicle or devices where it's interesting to look at the usage phase. For consumed goods like T-shirts, apparel, or non-electric products, it's really hard to do that. I think it's going to be interesting at one point, especially if you are able to give your profile as a consumer, how do you treat products, that's going to be interesting. But for now, for us, we decided to not focus on the gate-to-grave phase, Though we are ready to take that into consideration if we have a good solution for that. I think it's already hard for the consumer to grasp sometimes those informations. That's also something we're working on. We're not only calculating the footprints of the products, but we're providing, let's say, web components or visual components that can help you as a merchant or a brand to communicate in a way which is graspable by the consumers.

20:56 What's the footprint of this product? Because if you say a t-shirt is 6 kg CO2 equivalent, what does that mean? So we try to bring not only the calculation, but also some educational content for people to grasp it and to put it into context of their own footprint. And yeah, so that's how we calculate the footprint. We're taking the data, which are provided by the merchants, trying to enrich them with averages, which is sometimes not the ideal solution because averages are, you're increasing the error margin if you're using averages, but it's still better than having zero footprint. So, and at the end, what we do is we also, we are transparent about this error margin. We explain, for example, your t-shirt.

21:44 If you buy the t-shirt on Zalando and we are missing, I don't know, we don't know where it has been manufactured. We don't know the weight. So we will use an average weight cotton t-shirt. We will use the average footprint of a t-shirt taking into consideration that most of the t-shirts are manufactured in Bangladesh or Cambodia. And at the end we're going to put what we call an accuracy factor, which you could see as error margin. So the less accurate our calculation is, the larger the error margin can be. And we try to be transparent with that. We try to be transparent towards the consumers, telling them, hey, you have to take this data very carefully. And with the brands or the online shops and telling them, look, that's low accuracy, but we know how to improve that.

22:43 And to improve that, you would need to give us data A, B, C. So that's what we do. We don't have this definite and final value for the CO2. It's always possible to improve that if we get more data. But our catch is we want to start now. We don't want to wait for the entire supply chain to provide the data. It's going to come, hopefully, one day. But now we want to get started and already give a rough idea to the consumers. What's the impact of product A? What's hard to do then is to compare products between each other. Because you take the risk of comparing apple and bananas. And that's not really helpful. So there are certain thresholds where we cannot compare two products to each other if we are missing the data.

23:30 So we all have to look at this accuracy factor. You can compare two products that have very high accuracy factor. But if one has a very high and the other one has a low one, it's hard to compare them and to make a proper decision. But the whole goal is to, through transparency, help consumers understanding their footprint, but also helping them making right decisions when they're purchasing.

23:52 Ja, und just an idea so I would assume that will change the behavior of people buying stuff do you already see that people buy something where we have transparency compared to something where the product might be the better one in regards of sustainability but we don't have the data so the

24:24 point it does not change massively the at this stage is too early that's why there is an important work to be done on understanding those values what's for sure is transparency is making customer sticking to a specific platform that improve loyalty and on the purchase habits does not change much stage. What's the mindset of consumers in this case is to they might still purchase high carbon products or let's say products that have high carbon emissions and then they might compensate the emissions at the checkout. That's a behavior which we observe regularly but decided to not purchase a product because it has high emissions, I think it's too early for that. I think it will take time for educating people there. Where we see potential for this let's say low carbon purchase is more on the B2B side. And that's one of the surprises we got on the way because we were focusing pretty much on B2C at first.

25:40 And we started onboarding a bit by chance B2B online shops. And there the need grew for transparency for two reasons. One is regulation and the need for reporting. And secondly is we start seeing in B2B area carbon budgeting need. If I zoom in on the regulation part, businesses in Europe that have more than 500 employees are forced now to disclose information on social and environmental challenges. It's a European requirement. And there they have to report on their own emissions, what we call scope one and scope two of the carbon emissions. And they also have the option, it's still optional, to report on their purchased goods and services. And it takes time because the regulation was two years ago, if I remember well.

26:43 And now it starts to drill down in the company in different departments, including procurement departments, where they realize, okay, now the company measuring and reporting on the carbon emissions. And now they probably have to have reduction goals. And how can you set up reduction goals on your purchase if you don't know the footprint of what you purchase? And that's the switch we're observing now. And that's very interesting because there are different methods that are used now to calculate the footprint of goods and services. And the methods that are currently used are helpful for reporting, but they are not really helpful for deciding whether I purchase product A or product B. And that's where we see our chance now to help providing this transparency that helps making educated decisions for companies.

27:42 I think the B2C is still relevant, but it will take time for people because there are no incentivization to reduce their emissions while purchasing goods. But companies, they will be forced to reduce the emissions. So that's where we see potential on making those information transparent and helping businesses to purchase product A instead of product B.

28:09 That's very interesting because basically in every second interview, we come to the point that these regulations change everything. Yes. It's amazing that you start with the idea of getting more transparency to B2C customers and two steps along the road, you end up at B2B customers, not because they want to be good, but because they are forced to be transparent.

28:43 In B2C, there are crazy ideas about that, but it's going to be hard to tell everyone, hey listen, you have just, you are currently in average in Germany 11 tons per year, CO2 equivalent, and you have to go to two tons and we're going to restrict you. There are crazy ideas and there is like Dokonomy, it's a Scandinavian company and they went nuts a few years ago with this MasterCard with like carbon restrictions. So you could have a MasterCard that would actually mirror these two tons and you would have a monthly carbon budget and when you are beyond that you cannot purchase anymore and it feels like a dystopia for some people I guess but that's what's happening with companies slowly but surely and it's not going to be like they're not going to be restricted short term but they're going to have to report and they're going to have to report on reduction as well und das ist der pivot wir haben wir haben

29:49 wir

30:10 haben That's the point at the moment. If you tell a procurement manager, okay, you have to reduce your carbon footprint by 20% in the next two years, I guess she or he does not know where to start because he has not tooling. If he's buying IT products, he probably does not know, okay, should I buy an LED display or an OLED display or a Beamer? They have no clue. And that's where we want to bring transparency on that. And say, okay, you probably need to buy a Beamer if you have a big screen. I'm a bit detailed, but it's like those kind of information is missing at this stage. And also there is no reward at the moment for the brand that are making a lot of effort to be sustainable and to rethink their supply chain.

31:01 Ja, und wenn du zurückkehren, 2 Tonnen von CO2 per Person, ich, als Person, kann nicht sogar erreichen, weil die Baseline in Deutschland, so just weil ich ein German passport habe und ich live hier, mein Baseline ist über 2 Tonnen, und es ist nur was unsere Regierung für mich. So, of course, ich kann viel machen, And I've done all that electricity and stuff. But I, as a person, I'm still pretty limited. But the companies, they have a big leverage. Yes. Yeah.

31:44 It's interesting because companies, you see a lot of companies working on their own emissions. That means trying to reduce their employee traveling, trying to move to renewable energy for the offices. I don't know, providing vegetarian menu at the cafeteria. But at the end, 90% of their emissions come probably from things that are purchasing. And that's why in e-commerce, for example, it's very surprising, right? Everyone focuses on this green logistic, which is great because that's probably a very easy leverage for any e-commerce company. I mean, easy has to be defined, but it's still something they can act on. But 95% of the emissions comes from the products, the goods they are purchasing to resell then afterwards.

32:39 And that's something which is barely addressed, right? That's because it's hard. How do you do that? And I think there is the fear also like, okay, the only way to do that is to reduce sales, which might be one way. But the other way is to source better products, be transparent toward customers about the footprint of the products they are purchasing. And there is leverage, right, between a product which is manufactured in China and a product which is manufactured in France or Portugal. Huge gap. Materials, huge gap. Like you can't really act on that, but you have to be transparent on that. And there is a huge fear of greenwashing these days, which paralyzes a lot of companies. und da ist ein Risiko, für sicher.

33:19 Greenwashing ist ein ganz gefährliches Bereich und da sind viele Dinge veränderungen. Das Klimaneutraler Products ist jetzt zu beverhalten. Es wird bereits in France verhalten, aber du kannst du Produkt Klimaneutraler. Es gibt keine Neutralität. Es gibt eventuell nette Ziele, eine K There is leverage. Though you cannot solve everything with tech, but still, tech could be helpful in many, many areas.

33:57 Yeah, especially bringing the data, transforming data into a format that makes it usable in the end and creating the transparency that was done for so many other domains in the past.

34:12 But yeah, the data transparency for us is the biggest challenge for the upcoming months. And we're going to have to fight many challenges there on the technology. Though that's the one I'm less worried about because I know where I want to go. But there are challenges. If you look at data extraction, data enrichment, there are many challenges. You need to be able to process unstructured data, extract what you need from there, categorize products. I mean, that's well-researched areas. NLP and data extraction is something which is used already in the industry. The challenges that are most worrying is more on the acceptance on the brand side that we are publishing data without them agreeing upon that.

35:03 We already made the painful experience with a big brand that I won't name that refused us to publish what we thought would be the emission of their products. And they stated pretty directly that they were afraid of being sued and greenwashing. So that's a very challenging area for us. Like this regulation, being careful with the data we publish, being transparent about how we calculate things. Because we are not perfect and we are not pretending we're perfect. We're using averages. We're using data, which is not, you know, it's not like measuring the speed of a train or a plane where you can play with physics. Here we are making assumptions about supply chain and supply chain won't be transparent from a day to another.

35:53 It's not going to happen.

35:55 But it's important to start. Yeah. So I have to look at the time a bit. You already answered the question I wanted to ask about your biggest challenge. So I would like to get to my second last question. Are there any sources you can recommend regarding technologies, sustainability, which we can post to the show notes?

36:25 There are two sources I can think about. One is more how to get started with climate change. Bill Gates ist quite criticized sometimes, but I think his book about how to avoid a climate disaster is a pretty good starting point. There are a lot of good ideas and I think the problem is pretty well nailed down in the book. And then unfortunately for your podcast listeners, the second best literature around that is French. And I don't think it's translated, Jean-Marc Jancovici is an engineer in France and he wrote many books about climate change and what needs to be done to reverse that. You talked about government and his last book is a transformation plan for the French industry. How to reach the goals of 1.5 degrees by 2050.

37:32 And that's very, very well documented. He also published comics about how we build a world in 2050 if we don't change anything. So it's very, very well documented. I think that might be translated, but I think Bill Gates is probably, there would be one book I would probably recommend this one. I think it's pretty well documented. And he did his homework on the topic.

37:58 Yeah, cool. I already read it, but I can definitely recommend it too. Cool. Then, yeah, last question for now and here. Is there anyone you would like to hear in a later episode on the podcast?

38:17 I have two persons I'm probably thinking first, because they are the one I'm always discussing with about those topics of climate change. One is my friend Pierre Garot, who is also an ex-Liquid Labs. And we, by chance, ended up tackling more or less the same problem. He is the founder of Searoot, which is also a SaaS product to calculate the footprint in logistic in the shipping industry. Big area, fast-growing industry, as we all know, and very crucial as well for the global commerce. und in der gleichen Zeit, eine der meisten CO2-emittingen industries. Und es hat sehr, sehr challenging topics an dieser Seite, als auch. Und vielleicht die zweite, die nicht sehr objective ist, ist meine co-founder, Warena.

39:09 Ich denke, sie hat eine andere Perspektive auf den Topik. Wir sind ein paar Seiten, aber sie ist aus einer anderen Hintergrund. Und ich denke, ihr Punkt von der Sicht ist sehr interessant.

39:23 Cool. Ja, great. I will try to get interviews with both of them. Cool. Yeah, so I think we could talk another few hours about the topic. But yeah, let's stop here. Let's meet for a coffee.

39:44 Yes, definitely.

39:46 We have to do that.

39:48 I'm happy to meet on site. Vielen Dank, Nils, für die Chance zu erzählen, ein bisschen mehr über Juk. Und hoffentlich es inspiriert, die Leute zu uns in dieser großen Challenge zu joinen.

40:08 Ja, ich hoffe auch.

40:11 So, da bin ich wieder. Schön, dass du noch da bist und bis hierher zuhören mochtest. Die Shownotes mit Links zu Empfehlungen aus dieser Episode findest du auf softwareforfuture.de. Aber jetzt will ich es genau wissen. Ist das hier Quatsch oder Qualität? Hinterlass uns gerne eine Bewertung bei iTunes. Wir sind unheimlich gespannt, was du sagst und freuen uns, mit dir in Kontakt zu kommen. Und jetzt wünschen wir dir noch eine schöne weitere Woche. Wir sind der Software for Future Podcast und werden präsentiert und produziert von den Lionizers.

40:44 Danke fürs Zuhören.