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.
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.
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
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.
OLC is available to be licensed in any community in America.
Transparency: OLC is owned by In Place Impact, Students at CofC, and the Patel Family