Summer ‘23

About Jumpstart Refugee Talent 💼

Jumpstart Refugee Talent is a refugee-led nonprofit and the only national organization exclusively serving refugees seeking meaningful economic inclusion. Founded in 2016, they focus on economic empowerment of newly settled refugees in Canada by facilitating meaningful employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, including an online donation store that displays refugee-made goods for purchase.

Project Objective 🌟

Jumpstart’s current donation store is a static site that supports 25-35 refugee businesses completely manually by their team, resulting in issues with updated inventory information, stagnating sales, and friction between the refugee sellers and end customers.

Here’s what they were working with before:

Screenshot 2023-08-23 at 10.43.54 PM.png

Screenshot 2023-08-23 at 10.44.20 PM.png

As you can see, the current website is a donation store where the Jumpstart team has to manually handle all the purchases as the middleman, from placing refugee products onto the site and having no automated way to update if an item is out of stock, to connecting customer payments to refugee sellers via email.

To tackle this problem, we designed and developed a one-stop, Shopify-integrated marketplace website for customers to easily browse, shop, and purchase products from refugee-owned businesses that have partnered with Jumpstart Refugee Talent.

A peek into what we made:

Jumpstart_Refugee_Talent_Demo.mp4

Process 💭

Connecting with Client

After meeting with the Jumpstart team and discussing their needs more in-depth, we planned to build the following functional requirements for the marketplace:

  1. Marketplace website that integrates with each refugee business via Shopify API, allowing the website to display the most up-to-date information on each product for customers to browse and purchase.