Move With Compassion

The #MoveWithCompassion campaign has been a humbling and defining experience for our company.

For those of you who don't know, Lasso started in 2018. While our innovation and approach to products is new for the industry, we started the company with a strong set of values; timeless values that we feel resonate with the great parts of humanity that we have been able to observe during this crisis.

We believe that as a brand, we should help you feel empowered, and we should help you feel cared for. After all, that's why we make the products that we do. We feel a responsibility to help you take care of your body by applying our knowledge of medical science to the products we make. Everything we do follows the question, "How can we help our customers move better?"

When COVID-19 started to become a real issue in early March, Jared (the President of Lasso) and I were in St. Louis. We heard things were getting bad in New York and LA (our respective homes) and we cancelled a few meetings to get back home to our families. I remember vividly sitting in the airport and talking through everything that was happening in the world. Then Jared looked at me and said, "What can we do?"

When we got on our weekly team phone call a few minutes later, the first question we heard was, "What are we doing about this virus?"

That's the day I knew I had hired the right people to help build this company.

 

 

The tough truth is that we're a small team, and so to maximize our impact, I knew we had to think on our feet and get creative. We had to be smart about making sure we could make the biggest impact possible, without having to lay off or furlough any employees like we were seeing across the rest of the market.

Those are tough constraints to run a giveback effort, but we chose to go with a donation per purchase model because we had faith in you, our customers and supporters. We believed that if we gave our customer base an opportunity to help, we would together be able to make an impact. After all - it takes a village.

We chose to donate back to our first responders during this crisis because these first responders were the first customers who supported us. Without the nurses, lab techs, and physicians who gave us testimonials and purchased our compression socks, Lasso wouldn't exist today. Knowing these people were having a tough time fighting the high volume of COVID-19 cases, we knew our compression socks could help give them the secret weapon to make it through the crazy hours, day after day, for as long as this crisis lasts.

There were a few criteria that we used to determine where to send our donations. We looked at the numbers and identified hospitals in the hardest hit areas. We then identified people within those hospitals who would have the toughest time getting themselves Lasso compression socks.

Part way through the campaign, we started to get some coverage. We were highlighted in the Average Socialite and Outside Magazine, and then things started to get a little crazy. We saw thousands of emails pour in overnight, night after night, from nurses and physicians across the country who needed our socks.

While we weren't able to help everyone, we helped as many people as we possibly could within the constraints we had. This effort had our team working late nights and weekends, as we all put in the extra hours to do what we could in this situation that made us all feel helpless. It is true that in the tough moments in life where you feel like you can't make impact, it can be the little things that really make the difference.

I can say with confidence that this campaign showed us that even though we couldn't cure the virus, what we could do made more impact that we could have ever imagined. It showed us that to be human is to give and to love.

Often it's not about whether or not you can solve the problem, but it's about whether you care and whether you try. I can tell you from experience that trying is enough.

Without further ado, I am so proud to report that through the course of our giveback campaign, we have been able to:

• Donate to over 200 hospitals across the United States
• Partner with Heap Analytics to donate socks to hospitals across the country
• Participate in sponsoring a celebrity charity poker tournament (coming up soon) where proceeds will help us donate socks to more medical personnel

As a business, we unfortunately can't keep this campaign running forever. However, it is important to us to continue to support our first responders. To that end, we are launching a "Gift A Nurse" feature on our website to help us get more nurses into Lasso Compression Socks. We have also launched Affirm on our site, which helps set up interest free payment plans for our socks to make things easier financially for our customers.

There are still thousands of nurses and first responders we have not been able to help, who have reached out to us through our website and joined our list. We are making every effort to help those people who need the help.

From the bottom of my heart, to everyone who has been involved with this company and campaign in any way, I want to thank you for your support and passion. Together, we have made a significantly positive impact during a scary time for humanity, and that's an important thing to do.

We, at Lasso, are grateful for the opportunity to be one of the brands you trust to do good in a time like this, and we hope that this crisis resolves smoothly and quickly so we can all return to our regular lives.

Thank you,

Partha Unnava, CEO