The pandemic unleashed a growing new wave of small makers who are creating amazing products, from mouth-watering pastries to satiating whole meal kits. All of them have unique stories to tell behind the origin of their endeavors and creations. These makers currently have to rely on marketplaces and software built for traditional, high-volume, inventory, and time agnostic goods — platforms that emphasize the transactional relationship between the end-user and a business and often take a disruptive amount of margin.
Pastel's mission is to be the best growth partner a local business has. We know that if we serve these businesses well, everyone will benefit – a richer ecosystem of creative businesses will create more delightful things that make life joyful, which will create more stable jobs that will make our communities more successful.
More specifically, we take a much smaller commission of 10% – one that the businesses we're partnering with have told us is actually sustainable. We are small business owners ourselves. We started San Francisco cake shop Butter&, and it's the ultimate check on everything we do with Pastel. Is it something that we would find helpful to our own local business?
We are solving distribution by helping them bring their products to customers who are otherwise out of reach. We are building a platform that will truly understand the day-by-day dynamic nature of an inventory-sensitive small business. Along all of this, we are also building with a humans-first principle: help each and every small maker tell their story, and create a business that properly rewards folks for their labor.
Pastel was started in April 2021 by Butter& co-owners Amanda Nguyen and Ted Moran, who felt first-hand the difficulties of running a small artisanal business. Their online shop was hacked together using Shopify, Airtable, and myriads of plugins. Their distribution was generally limited to the small radius that food delivery can handle, with the occasional far deliveries that often come with exorbitant fees. A solution did not exist to solve their problems, so they created one, convinced that other similar, small businesses, are also facing similar problems.
Since then, we added a technical co-founder, built out an amazing operations team, and raised $4 million in funding from investors like Evan Moore (co-founder of Doordash), Gokul Rajaram (head of Caviar), Stephen Chau (co-founder of Uber Eats), Drew Scott and Linda Phan (Property Brothers stars), Manik Gupta (former CPO of Uber), Toby Sun (co-founder of Lime), and Ilya Abyzov and Adrian Aoun (co-founders of Forward).