Our Story
Our Local Commerce (OLC) was created in a partnership between Mayor John Tecklenburg (the City of Charleston), a team of remarkable Honors College Students at the College of Charleston, In Place Impact, and the Patel Family.
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During COVID, hundreds of business in Charleston had to close their doors, laying off thousands of people. Research showed that between C to C and B to B purchases, our city (with only 140,000 people), spent over $800,000,000 on goods and services procured from businesses with no presence in our community. Over $100,000,000 of that was spent on Amazon.com.
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Mayor Tecklenburg challenged us to build a platform that would help:
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Local businesses survive, grow, and hire back the people that were laid-off
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Encourage new innovations and be located in Charleston and to grow from within
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Help bring back to Charleston material amounts of the capital leaving its economic ecosystem
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Provide residents with an effective and efficient way to buy local
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Create opportunities for the most vulnerable residents incur community to make an income
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The result is chs.ourlocom.com, which is a unique, place-based e-commerce platform that achieves all of the above, as well as showing users how much of the money the spend will remain in Charleston's economic ecosystem.
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OLC is available to be licensed in any community in America.
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Transparency: OLC is owned by In Place Impact, Students at CofC, and the Patel Family