1000 days in business! But we still haven't 'made it'.

Can you believe it? We made it to our 1000th day in business.

That’s right, 2 years, 8 months and 26 days of learning and building, and growing everyday. And it’s been a crazy ride. It’s been a roller coaster of failures and success. The highest highs and lowest lows sometimes in one afternoon. Sometimes in the span of 45 minutes! I mean, we had an idea what we were signing up for, but we didn’t really know how hard it was going to be.

But we have done a lot. A lot more than we thought possible actually.

A few of those accomplishments:

-Launched our flagship Seasonal Discovery Box from our basement in March 2021. It sold out in days to customers in every province and territory in Canada. What the heck? At least that’s what we thought at the time.

-Moved from our basement to our facility at the Edmonton International Airport.

-Started helping organizations to improve their gifting. One team told us “this is the best corporate gift we’ve ever received. Way better than what we got last year!”. To date we’ve worked with over 500 organizations. We’ve served just a couple, you know, modest operations you probably haven’t heard of like Air Canada, Apple, Amazon, The Royal Canadian Mint, EY, Indspire, Facebook, Shopify, The Government of Canada, Telus…and just a few (several hundred) others.

-Launched build-a-box, ready-made boxes, and our marketplace (holy moly things have gotten complicated).

-Been recognized by The Indigenomics Institutes (we made it onto their Top Ten to Watch list), we won the Innovators and Entrepreneurs Foundation Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year. And a whole bunch of nominations for other awards, including the Alberta Women Entrepreneurs Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year, and RBC Women of Influence award, The Alberta Chamber of Commerce Alberta Business Award and the Governor General's Innovation Award (these were cool but it’s not why we do this)

-And (this is the very best part) worked with over 500 Indigenous suppliers, and helped many of them grow through mentorship (often just listening), collaboration, and most importantly, through your orders. 

Small but mighty. We still haven’t ‘made it’...but we aren't stopping now.

All of these were huge accomplishments for us but the truth is all of this stuff makes us seem bigger than we really are. It’s not just me and Kham anymore but we are still a very small team. Small but mighty. It’s still ‘all hands on deck’ solving problems, and putting out fires left and right. Because, in a lot of ways, WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE ARE DOING!

So how have we done it? It was you.

There is one reason and one reason alone that we have done all of this. It’s because you believed that this thing called Indigenous Box is worth doing, and if we do it right we can have a real impact for Indigenous businesses and for the Canadian retail market. 

Do you remember how this all started?

1000 days ago Indigenous Box was just me and my husband Kham in our basement imagining what it would be like to have a business. But not just any business, one that could actually improve lives and make more room for Indigenous people in commerce. That was our goal when we wrote this mission statement: 

Indigenous Box’s mission is to promote and elevate the good work being done by Indigenous Entrepreneurs. You can bet that we are going to make as big a noise as we possibly can, as far and wide as we possibly can.

Our company champions Indigenous people’s true legacy: Our ingenuity; our resourcefulness; our industriousness; our intentionality; our purposefulness; our ability; our cooperation; our greatness.

We are guided by values based on the teachings of shared abundance through reciprocity and connectedness. At our core is a commitment to transparency, fairness, humility, continuous learning, and bold action

What’s next?

Now the real work starts. We grew so fast that our operations have to grow to meet the demand for Indigenous goods. But the good news is that when we improve and grow so do hundreds of other Indigenous businesses. We grow together. And we plan to take this as far as we can. We want to do our part to bring Indigenous people into mainstream commerce. Equal players who are recognized as the big contributors that we are. We want to take Indigenous goods worldwide and to establish a brand that can champion Indigenous businesses for generations to come.

We still need your help

We rely on you, our loyal customers, to help us improve. So tell us, what do you want to see? How can we make your experience with Indigenous Box better? How can we improve to accomplish our mission.

But also…don’t stop spreading the word. Your voice is the key to our success. In fact, your collective voice has been our entire marketing plan. We haven’t even spent any money on ads. It's all just you.

We are planning to change the world...are you in?

ekosí pitâmâ (that's all for now),

Mallory