What this is
Most research on this asks consumers how they feel about brands doing good. This one asks the people building it. Twenty to thirty founders, one conversation each, about how impact actually got made inside a growing company.
The point is to build something the industry doesn't currently have: a picture of the work that shows the tradeoffs, the wrong turns, and the parts that took longer than anyone expected. Written for founders themselves, in the language they actually use.
The conversation
Thirty minutes, six questions. How impact became part of the business. What you've built. What's working and why. What it's taken. Where you're stuck. What you wish someone had told you.
What you get
- Findings before they're public.
- Nothing attributed without your approval.
- Six good questions about work you rarely get asked about.
Findings arrive in June 2027 as a written report, sent to participants a week before public release. Participants who choose attribution are quoted by name and company. Everyone else is aggregated in.
Who's asking
I spent eight years at Alex and Ani during its growth stage, in the Charity by Design department, moving over $60 million to nonprofits across five countries and helping build wells in Guatemala and Haiti. After more years working with consumer brands across impact strategy and brand marketing, I built Talawah Impact in response to what I kept seeing: real impact happening inside companies, without the frameworks to name it.
Which is why this study exists. The frameworks for talking about brand impact were built for a different era, and the founders building today are ahead of them.
Who I'm looking for
- Founder or co-founder of a consumer brand you're still running.
- Past the earliest days. Real distribution, real customers, real operations.
- Impact already built. Sourcing, giving, community, product, something real that lives inside the business.
- Willing to talk about the harder parts. What broke, what took too long, what you'd do differently.