14-15 Tripe Marketing Board and We Care foodbank
Earlier in the year we featured Ray Barron-Woolford on the cover of The Big Issue to highlight the work he was doing with his community hub in Deptford, South London. Just a few months later, Barron-Woolford’s We Care foodbank was looking at permanent closure after it received a £33,000 energy bill estimate for 2023. But it was saved by a Robin Hood-style fundraising odyssey, after a group of friends calling themselves the Tripe Marketing Board (TMB) stumbled across an accidental goldmine in the world’s fifth-biggest company.
The TMB use the name to promote their self-published books. One such book is Forgotten Yorkshire and Parts of North Derbyshire and Humberside. On Black Friday Amazon reduced its price from £10 to 99p. However, it was still paying the TMB full royalties for each sale.
“We noticed that we got a couple of sales at 99p and it was full commission. So we thought, well, yeah we’ve got to do something with this,” said Paul Etherington of the Tripe Marketing Board.
After using the group’s 21,000 followers as a sounding board to find a suitable partner to donate to, Etherington and Barron-Woolford struck up a deal that £2 a copy would go to We Care for the duration of the deal. Social media, neighbours and friends were all roped into the effort to buy as many 99p copies as they could. In the end, 7,468 copies were sold
