We plant a tree with every order. Here are the numbers, a year on.

We plant a tree with every order. Here are the numbers, a year on.

We switched this on in September 2025 and I said I would write up the numbers after a year, mostly because when we were deciding, nobody else had. Every post I found was either a supplier's case study or an announcement from a brand three weeks in, which tells you nothing.

Short version: we have funded 18,400 trees across roughly 57,000 orders, it costs about 32p an order, and we are keeping it. Longer version below, including what did not work.

Why we did it, and what we were careful not to claim

Not for the carbon. I want to be blunt about that, because it is where I think a lot of brands get themselves into trouble.

We have a real footprint — shipping and packaging, mostly — and a tree per order does not cancel it out. What it does is attach something tangible to a purchase the customer was making anyway. We treat it as part of the product experience, not as an environmental claim.

If we had launched it as "carbon neutral shipping" we would have been overstating it, and sooner or later somebody would have said so publicly. The rules on this have tightened in several markets and I would rather be boring than be a case study in somebody's greenwashing article.

The setup

It took about a fortnight and one developer, most of which was our own checkout being non-standard rather than anything on their side. Not a one-click install, but not a project either.

The thing I cared about was that each tree is geolocated and tied to a named project rather than being a counter on a dashboard. Customers can see roughly where. That is the difference between this and buying a badge for your checkout page, and it is worth paying a bit more for.

What actually happened with customers

Here is where I have to be careful, because this is the bit everyone wants to hear and the bit most likely to be overstated.

We cannot isolate a commercial effect. We changed our packaging and ran a loyalty pilot in the same period, so anyone claiming a clean attribution here is guessing. What I can report is that 41 reviews have mentioned it unprompted, support has had no complaints about it at all, and it comes up in customer emails more often than anything else we have added to the checkout.

For something costing 32p an order, that is enough for me. I would not claim it has driven conversion, because I cannot prove it, and I have seen brands claim it on much thinner evidence than we have.

What did not work

Three things, in ascending order of annoyance.

The certificate email arrived too late at first. It landed days after the dispatch note, by which point the customer had moved on. Moving it into the order confirmation flow fixed it, but we should have caught that in testing.

We over-explained it at first. Our original product-page copy had three sentences about the project. Nobody read them. It works better as one line with a link for the people who care, and it took us a couple of months to accept that.

It is not free and it is not a marketing budget line. At 32p an order it is a real cost that scales exactly with volume, which is the opposite of how most marketing spend behaves. On a good month that is a bigger number than you budgeted for. Worth modelling before you commit rather than after.

The thing I would tell another founder

Check what you are actually buying.

There is a real difference between funding tree planting and buying a verified carbon credit, and plenty of suppliers are hazy about it — in a couple of conversations I had, I am fairly sure the salesperson did not know.

Trees are a contribution with an estimated benefit accruing over decades. A carbon credit is a registered, audited unit, retired once against a serial number you can look up on a public registry. Different products, different prices, and critically, different claims you are allowed to make in your marketing.

Evertreen sells both and keeps them separate, which is what made me comfortable. Their per-tree CO₂ figure is stated as a lifetime estimate rather than an annual one, and the method behind it is published. I do not need to be a forestry expert to check that — I just need it written down somewhere I can find it, which is more than I could say for two of the alternatives we looked at.

The other thing I would check is who does the planting. Evertreen is an intermediary and says so on its transparency page; local partners do the work. I would rather that than a company implying it runs everything itself, which at the scale some of them claim is not plausible.

The honest caveat

I cannot verify what happens in Kenya. Nobody running a business our size can, and I would not trust a founder who told you otherwise. What I can do is check that the project exists on a public registry, that the method is published, and that the supplier answers awkward questions with specifics rather than adjectives.

That is a lower bar than certainty. It is the bar that is actually available to someone in my position, and I would rather state it plainly than imply a level of diligence I did not do.

Would I recommend it

For a physical-products brand, yes, with one condition: describe it accurately.

"We fund a tree for every order" is true and good and customers respond to it. "Carbon neutral" almost certainly is not, and the distance between those two sentences is exactly where brands get themselves written about.

Happy to answer questions if anyone is weighing this up.

We fund trees through Evertreen. This is not a paid post. They asked whether we would share the numbers and we said yes, on the basis that we would include the parts that did not go well.