Birame Sock

Birame Sock displayed early signs of entrepreneurial spirit as a teenager living in Niger, where her father was posted: ‘It was so hot there, I made ice and frozen juices in my mother’s freezer and hired a boy to go out and sell them in the streets when I got back from school!’ Needless to say no-one got a receipt along the way, which may have unwittingly sparked the idea that her company, Third Solutions, has developed twenty years later – to do away with paper receipts altogether!

Blazing away the paper trail

The idea first struck her in 2004 on a trip to New York. ‘I saw a friend weighed down with a huge bag of receipts he had to organise for his tax returns,’ she recalls. ‘That summer, an old friend told me she had gone through her trash to try and find a receipt for an appliance that needed returning. I started researching the subject, saw its huge potential and set up the business in 2007.’

Third Solutions employs 16 people and its MyReceipts service has successfully launched with its first major retailer, Whole Foods Market, the natural and organic food chain, where the pilot run in one store drew thousands of sign-ups in three weeks. It now also offers receipt-free shopping to clients at Office Depot, Amazon.com, Hertz and Best Buy, among others. The concept is simple: consumers opt for the MyReceipts service for free and will no longer receive a paper receipt at checkout, regardless of whether they pay by cash, check or credit card. Receipts will be available online instead, as will all coupons or promotional discounts users have accrued. If proof of purchase is needed, it can be printed out from the Internet or forwarded by e-mail. ‘The scope is almost endless. Expense accounts need never be quite such a headache again!’

Revenue is generated through commissions on coupons and will expand in future to other areas including mining data from Stock-Keeping-Unit (SKU) information that cannot currently be exploited. So prepare for a time when you could know highly targeted information such as how much cholesterol or fat you are buying or whether a particular product you have purchased has been recalled by the manufacturer.

Retailers too can know if you are consuming their products or not and target you accordingly. Birame is unequivocal about maintaining client privacy and the security of their data however: ‘Targeting is an opt-in service for consumers and no personal information will be sold to manufacturers or retailers,’ she assures. ‘We’ll simply provide aggregative reports or general consumer profiles.’ Most importantly, truckloads of paper, and therefore trees, will be saved.

Brave new world

Third Solutions is not Birame’s first company. In 2002 she set up a business for music applications via the telephone, which she sold in 2007. This current venture has proved more challenging, especially in terms of finding investors in a conservative climate and convincing them she has what it takes to lead this project in a predominantly male field.

Birame has met some key women mentors, one of whom, Anne Busquet, first told her about the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, and is excited about taking her company further and benefiting from the coaching the Awards will bring. ‘I originally come from Senegal, where a lot of women drop out of education young and feel they have no more opportunities. I hope to show them just how wrong that is. If somebody says “no”, you must use that as fuel to go forward!’