CHOOSE FINCH • UPFRONT
Local
A BETTER WAY TO BROWSE A conversation with Lizzie Horvitz, Vineyarder and creator of Choose Finch, a more sustainable way to shop online.
Kyra Steck: Lizzie, what’s your connection to the Island? Lizzie Horvitz: My parents started coming to Martha’s Vineyard when my mom was in college. When my sister and I were born, we spent almost the whole summer here. When I was around 11, we bought a house, and it’s become the most special place for us. It’s really what I call home.
Lizard, which came out in 2016. Meanwhile, I went to work for a startup based in Asia, and really fell in love with entrepreneurship and the startup space, taking a company from inception to scale, and realized that the Green Lizard could become a full-time thing. And that’s how Finch was born.
KS: Tell me a bit about your background before Finch. LH: I’ve been in the sustainability space for my entire career. After college, I went to get my MBA and my master’s in environmental management, focusing on big companies’ carbon footprints. I then went to work for Unilever, where I was on their supply chain team before shifting to their sustainability team. While I was there, I started getting a lot of questions from family and friends who didn’t have a formal background in sustainability on how they could reduce their own footprint. “I don’t like using paper straws; what type of metal straw should I be buying?” or “I just had a baby; are cloth diapers better than disposables?” I realized that the content out there was very difficult to sift through. On the one hand, you have these very academic papers that weren’t meant for the average person, and then on the other, you had this rise of “mommy bloggers,” who are super-well-intentioned, but are saying things like, “This is all natural,” and “This is eco-friendly,” which isn’t really based in fact. So I started a newsletter called the Green
KS: What exactly is Finch? LH: The product right now is this browser extension, where we’ve rated products on a scale of 1 to 10. On your desktop, everybody has a browser to use the internet. That’s either Chrome, Safari, Firefox ... A browser extension really helps provide additional information that the specific page you’re going to doesn’t have. To start, you go to the Chrome Store or the Firefox store on your desktop, and you can download the Finch extension. The beauty is that you can go on amazon.com, and the additional information you’re looking for will automatically come up without you having to go to a separate spot to search for it. With the Finch extension, we use a series of attributes to rate products. These attributes range from “What’s the likelihood that this product will shed microplastics?” all the way to “What’s the carbon footprint in this manufacturing phase?” So then, whenever you go on Amazon and search for a certain product, we’ll tell you what we like, what could be better, what that score is, as well as three alternatives, in case you’re interested in making a better decision.
Interview by Kyra Steck
KS: What e-commerce websites will Finch work for? Will it also work for shopping sites that are more local? LH: Right now, it only applies to Amazon. Then we’ll go on a couple of other large retailer sites, and then eventually the goal is to be on every e-com site, both large and small. Local definitely is a priority for us, but the reason we’re starting with Amazon is because we want to reach as many people as possible. Lizzie Horvitz
KS: I really appreciate Finch’s focus on accessibility. Can you expand on what that means for Finch, and for climate action as a whole? LH: I look at accessibility in two ways. First, what’s really important to Finch as a company is accessibility for marginalized populations and groups of people who have historically been left out of the sustainability
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