We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Clare Richards a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Clare thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Let’s rewind eight years ago. It’s 2015, pre-pandemic, and my husband, Brandon, and I are both working fairly conventional full-time careers. It was right around this time that a mentor of mine introduced me to an international organization called Rotary, and specifically a subset organization under the Rotary umbrella called Rotaract. Rotaract is a young leaders service organization designed to engage 18-30 year olds in community service and professional development. Inspired by the vision and mission, Brandon and I embarked on starting a Rotaract chapter in our community of Saint Cloud, Minnesota. Getting Saint Cloud Rotaract off the ground was a heavy, yet rewarding, lift. Almost immediately, we began working with local school districts on back-to-school supply drives, as supporting youth was a shared passion among our club members.

I’ll never forget a poignant conversation Brandon and I had with the principal of a local elementary school. She pointed out that over 90% of her students came without even a pencil on the first day of school. Not even a pencil! Brandon and I are both fortunate to have privileged upbringings, in which we had never encountered this level of poverty and need. So hearing the reality of many students in our own community was nearly unbelievable. This led us down a major rabbit hole of research and digging. We saw this need across many schools in our community, our state, and across the country. We saw that teachers were spending obscene amounts out-of-pocket on supplies for their classrooms. We heard personal stories from adults that endured this same experience as a child. They shared with us the shame and unworthiness they felt, as they arrived on the first day of class with none of the same supplies as their peers.
This wasn’t the first time we encountered the school supply industry, however. Both Brandon and I worked for OfficeMax during college, where we saw firsthand the number of teachers spending out-of-pocket on supplies. We also saw frazzled parents trying to get their back-to-school shopping done as quickly as possible. Often, we were the empathetic ear to frustrated parents who were on their third or fourth stop, still struggling to find all the required supplies.
After encountering these different facets of the same challenge, Brandon and I put our heads together to come up with a solution. That solution became Impacks.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Impacks is a tech-powered company that simplifies the way parents and educators access critical supplies for students. Our platform and products improve the back-to-school shopping experience for parents, saving them time and money. Simultaneously, we support teachers by customizing our solutions to fit their specific classroom needs, ensuring they have the right materials in their classroom to create optimal learning environments without having to spend their own money on supplies.

After three years of methodical research, we launched our first product: customized, prepackaged school supply kits offered at less than half the national average cost. Through the checkout process, we galvanize parents and community members with the means to donate to support their school. As a company with a social impact mission, we match a portion of each donation.

We launched Impacks amid the onset of the pandemic in 2020, which posed both a challenge and an opportunity. It was incredibly difficult to get in front of schools while they were encumbered by crisis after crisis. But the need for online shopping had never been greater.

We grew slowly at first, starting with school partnerships in our local Greater St. Cloud market. From there, we grew partnerships across the state of Minnesota. This year, we have partnerships with schools across eight states in the Upper Midwest.

In addition to partnering with K-12 private, public, and charter schools, we have been lucky to partner with nonprofit organizations and businesses. We’re able to help nonprofits source back-to-school supplies quickly and at negotiated rates. We’re also able to support businesses by helping them fulfill their social impact goals by facilitating back-to-school drives within their community on behalf of the company.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship. As a society, we typically discuss resilience as this magical toughness that comes naturally to those who are entrepreneurial by nature. I think of resiliency as much less glamorous or mythical.

I think every entrepreneur must have the desire to persevere. But often that perseverance comes from necessity. Think of it from the lens of Sunk-Cost Fallacy, described as, “the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.” (Oxford Languages) Every entrepreneur I know has fallen into this sunk-cost pit. Whether they’ve invested every dollar to their name, or put their personal reputation on the line, every business-owner has entered into a situation where they feel they’re “too far in” to give up.

We’ve been there many times over the last several years with Impacks. We sold our house and put all of the profits into this business. We drained our savings, and sacrificed just about every spare second to work on this business. Every single day feels like riding a ship in the midst of a storm. On the same day, we will experience an elated high from a major partnership closing, followed immediately by one show-stopping crisis or another. And on and on. Resilience is scary, and it doesn’t feel magical or mythical when you’re in it. But resiliency is usually accompanied by colossal faith – faith in ourselves, faith in the business concept, and faith in the support ecosystem. If we didn’t have faith, we wouldn’t be resilient.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I’ve read The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek at least a dozen times. The book is based on the concept of finite and infinite games, as articulated by James P. Carse. In finite games, our goal is to win. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a clear winner. Infinite games are quite different. The purpose of an infinite game is to continue the game play. There is no winning when it comes to infinite games.

Business owners so often focus on finite games as it pertains to their business. They want to “win” and to beat their competitors in the process. But the most successful companies focus on infinite games. They play to beat themselves – they aim to continue game play.

I’ve embraced the infinite mindset in my own leadership style. I work actively to pause and recognize when I’m pursuing a finite goal, and try to shift to an infinite mindset in those moments.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.myimpacks.com
• Instagram: clare.richards
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarerichardsmn/