What percentage of the money goes to the survivors?

There are several ways the money goes back to the survivors and it is helpful to understand them all before I break into percentages.

The first way is the original purchase of the products. We pay in advance and don't use intermediaries, so 100% of that goes to the survivors before we even offer the products to you. Recouping this is about 30% of your sales price.

When we sell the products we reinvest the money into buying more products from survivors, and because we are growing, we have to purchase them even faster than we sell them. This takes up about another 20-30% of your sales price.

Also - we have an extensive business development program to help grow the survivor's businesses. This includes everything from product development for our more advanced partners, to the beginning process of training and buying production equipment. This takes up a further 30-40% of your sales price.

So - altogether, about 80-90% goes to the survivors/NGOs for the products or to help them grow their business. The rest covers our basic overhead or is contributed to TEN Charities for other non-business anti trafficking work.

please note, these numbers change all the time as we grow and as we improve - we are committed to keeping our overhead low. For example, the two founders, who used their life savings to start this program, still do not receive any salary.

There is an additional point that I want to make that is very important. As we help the survivors and the NGOs grow their business, they often face the same trade offs about price and volume that any business does.

For example, take a group that makes jewelry. If we can buy the jewelry for $10 and sell it on the web for $20 then we can cover our costs. But we can sell a lot more of their jewelry if we can wholesale it, after all there are thousands of jewelry stores in the US. But to sell into wholesale we need to pricethe items so that instead of getting 50% the survivors only get 20-25% .

So the question we have to help them with is: will they be better off selling for a lower price but selling a lot more products? Since the goals of most groups is to hire more survivors selling larger volumes is more important to them than maximizing profits, but in many cases they will support more survivors and make more profits if we can wholesale their products. Therefore, over time, the percentage of sales price to the provider that chooses this path will decline from 50% to 20-25%,but this is their choice and don’t to fulfill their goals.

Also, if we ever get this wrong and pay to little to the surviors upfront, they get the extra anyway as we donate the profits back to TEN Charities.