The Best Way to Support Your Small Business Community This Season is to Be a Customer
Each year we publish our annual CO.STARTERS Holiday Gift Guide to help you invest your shopping dollars where they matter most: with small businesses. This year’s collection features products from more than 150 starters, and behind each of them, a supportive community powered by the CO.STARTERS network.
This year, more than ever, supporting small businesses and solopreneurs with our holiday spending provides a direct way to take actions that rebuild the very fabric of our communities.
This year, more than ever, we’ve experienced how community can transcend local, geographic, and cultural barriers.
We believe the strongest communities are built through density of trust and clarity of purpose. Community is built around the things we share. Community is at the core of everything we do at CO.STARTERS. We’ve built our programs on the philosophy that no one thrives alone, whether in life or in business.
Not everyone will become a starter, a mentor, or an entrepreneurial leader. But every one of us has the power to be a customer.
As Victor Hwang, founder of Right to Start, reminds us: “It’s not just about the three people in a thousand who become entrepreneurs; it’s about the other 997 people who support them.”
Grassroots entrepreneurship can change the trajectory of economies at a local and national scale. Not everyone will become a starter, a mentor, or an entrepreneurial leader. But every one of us has the power to be a customer.
Be a customer in your community this season. Shop your downtown merchants. Watch your social channels for street fairs and popups. Search for online collections like ours that track with your shared purpose. Dig into the stories of the people behind the products you are buying. Buy gift cards to help them with a purchase now that they can fulfill later. Go a step beyond shopping to give them a share, a rating, or a meaningful review that will help get them more customers.
Be the customer you wish you had, if you were a small business owner.
Shop small with these communities:
