Melltoo puts used goods to good use for a worthy cause

Morrad Irsane and Sharene Lee co-founders of Melltoo sit around a table with several smartphones arranged over the table.

DUBAI: Melltoo, the brainchild of couple Morrad Irsane and Sharene Lee, is a second-hand items app with a charitable twist.

Irsane’s mother inspired the pair to create an app-based marketplace for second-hand goods — and inspired them to find a way to make it socially responsible by offering sellers the opportunity to donate sales proceeds to UAE-registered charities.

She was well used to recycling clothes between her 13 children — and as the youngest, Irsane was usually dressed in hand-me-downs from his brothers.

When his mother travelled from France to visit her home village in Algeria, she took second-hand items as gifts — a habit that became a successful business, eventually leading her to be an angel investor and microfinancier in Algeria. “Where the idea of Melltoo started, I grew up in this mentality of not wasting stuff,” Irsane said. But even explaining to his mother that he was basically digitising a marketplace similar to the ones she had set up in Algeria didn’t satisfy her.

“She said there was one thing missing — where is the good?” And so Melltoo’s charitable aspect was born — a function that distinguishes it so much from its peers that it is sometimes described as “the charity app”.

It’s an aspect of the business Irsane and Lee intend to take further.

For while charities can usually sell off donations of second-hand clothes, they sometimes struggle to know what to do with electronics — the primary focus of Melltoo’s marketplace. Irsane and Lee are now looking at selling such items on behalf of charities who receive them as donations. Melltoo even carries a hashtag: #Resell4aCause.
But the charitable aspect only works when it’s built on a solid base.

Lee said that when people sell big-ticket items such as cars or real estate, they take the time and effort to meet buyers, answer phone calls and so on — an effort they are not prepared to make for smaller, less valuable items.

“That’s the gap that we fill. We want to make it easy for you, so you just take a couple of photos, get it sold, we’ll come and pick up from your house and deliver it to the buyer and there’s very little else to do.

“This is where we’re positioning ourselves. It’s those little things in our lives. That’s where the clutter is. That’s actually what’s killing the planet — that’s what ends up in landfills.”

To ensure buyer satisfaction, Melltoo holds onto payments for three days

Melltoo is Irsane and Lee’s third business together, having run restaurants in the US and an import-export business in Dubai.
“The problem with those traditional businesses is that there’s a ceiling, and there’s four walls,” Irsane said. “If you have a coffee shop, you can accommodate 30, 50 people. Likewise for a manufacturer. you cannot produce more than the machine can do. I noticed the limits.”
In the digital space, Irsane said, there are no such limitations. Melltoo’s 22-strong team is multinational, with customer service in Cairo, developers in India, more staff in the Ukraine.

“Even though we have an office here in Dubai, we don’t really use it,” Lee said. “We work from home, in coffee shops, in co-working spaces… It’s a revolution on many fronts — not only in the type of business we’re doing, the technology, but in the way we work.”
Having built its market in the UAE — where Irsane says growth has been 15-20 per cent month on month — Melltoo is now ready to expand geographically, eyeing first Cairo, then Riyadh.

“We’ve spent the first few years working on the product and the business model,” Lee said. “Only just now are we ready to scale it up.”