Brightly is a curated discovery platform for all things ethical and sustainable. It is an entirely community-driven lifestyle brand empowering like-minded consumers who also happen to be community contributors.
Brightly gets over 250,000 visitors every day on its app and website who seek peer support in finding reliable, eco-friendly products.
With more than ten thousand active members worldwide, their community is growing stronger every day.
As guests on a podcast on sustainable fashion, Laura Wittig and Liza Moiseeva shared a vision. Their goal was to inspire consumers to be more conscious about the environment and guide them in the right direction to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle.
The Stress on Eco-Conscious Consumers
However, they soon realised that it was overwhelmingly difficult for consumers to switch to ethically sourced, sustainable products. Their biggest enemies were the big brands who use a clever choice of words to reveal only half-truths about the products they are selling.
Many eco-conscious consumers were unknowingly using products they assumed were eco-friendly due to deceptive marketing.
Laura & Liza were there to guide the consumers and recommend brands and products that are ethically and sustainably created worldwide. They soon realised that two were not enough to support consumers’ growing interest in adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle.
Many consumers were getting too stressed out in finding the right products that they can trust. On the other hand, the duo struggled to keep up with growing questions and emails from conscious consumers. But, quitting was not an option.
They needed like-minded volunteers, a community, and a platform to support the community. That’s how Brightly began as an eco-conscious digital community on popular social media platforms – TikTok & Instagram.
However, due to the lack of customizations and an overcrowded environment, Brightly wasn’t shaping up as initially envisioned. They needed their own app, fully customized, to make their dream platform come to life.
Building and running your own social platform is not an easy task, particularly when your main focus is managing a community of eco-conscious consumers. You won’t like spending time dealing with complicated technicalities when you have a community to care for. Luckily, they found a dependable ally.
Building a Close-Knit Community Platform
When Brightly approached tchopTM with their goals and vision, they were clear with their requirements. Apart from a stable core framework to handle their growing number of visitors, they needed community supporting features that empower users to help and get help quickly. Brightly also wanted their app to be customised to the core.
Brightly provided custom designs as they needed a more customised user interface. tchopTM worked closely with Brightly on a custom branch, giving both tchop & Brightly creative freedom to add additional ideas for customisation.
Motivating users from actively discussing articles, guides, and new product reviews was a challenge. Most of the discussion threads on other platforms run dry with low to no community members’ participation. tchopTM came up with a persistent comment button and a simplified 1-click to comment process to promote active discussions. tchopTM understands the importance of quality comments as a driving force in a community. So they designed a comment highlight system that automatically features the most helpful comments to motivate quality commenting.
With a massive community of active users, chatrooms can get overcrowded and noisy. tchopTM implemented topic-specific chat groups to address this problem. It’s like keeping separate rooms for each subject within the eco-friendly lifestyle community.
The custom design branch enabled the deployment of new ideas to make community member’s lives easier. One way out of this was to qualify users based on regular surveys and tag their profiles based on their interests. This would help Brightly suggest dedicated community chat groups to users.
Brightly also customised their push notification sounds to stand apart from a dozen other notifications that average smartphone users receive. This helps community members to quickly identify and respond to queries from other members.
With all the customisations and feature implementations in place, Brightly finally launched the app in November 2020.
But will the members prefer the Brightly app over social media champs – TikTok and Instagram?
The Feedback from a Thriving Eco-Conscious Digital Community
“This is overall the game-changer” – The first reaction from a Brightly ambassador after using the app.
Soon after the launch, thousands of members switched to the Brightly app and found a new home. Gradually, the active user base crossed ten thousand members. Yet, due to a solid framework – the app works without a hitch.
Brightly and tchopTM were eager to get feedback from users. Finding information or seeking help in such a large community can be overwhelming. But the platform was custom designed to make lives easier, and only community members could provide genuine feedback on that aspect.
The response was promising..
“The app is really easy to use and it’s really organised. I’m exploring my way of sustainability and this is the best way to get there.”
Many community members were surprised at how Brightly could bypass all the initial design flaws associated with a brand-new app launch.
“For a new app, it’s such an easy one to navigate through. Love the layout and the simplicity of the app. Awesome community to be apart of – super friendly and supportive members and founders. Good place to go for tips and advice!”
The app was just a platform. Laura & Liza, along with thousands of eco-conscious members & community scouts, realised their dream.
Brightly stands out from the crowd of popular platforms like Amazon and Shopify and showcases the brand, product, and story first, regardless of monetary compensation.
Products that appear on Brightly must meet stringent sustainability and eco-friendly criteria as well as support other values such as empowering women, supporting animal rescues, and more.
The success of Brightly as a community on a technological platform powered by tchop can be summed up in one statement:
“I think a lot of people today could build software to connect people and sell things, but very few people could get thousands of fanatical followers to actually engage with each other and make that software useful. Brightly built that community with matchsticks and tape.” – Leslie Feinzaig, the founder of Female Founders Alliance. (Source: TechCrunch).
You can download brightly from Google Play or App Store.
Learn how tchopTM can help build your own digital community.