Empowering Lives, One Shade at a Time: The WITHOUT Story

I became involved in waste management when I learned about the plight of nearly 4 million waste pickers in India, living in poverty. Simultaneously, I discovered that half of India’s waste remains untreated or ends up in landfills.

Anish Malpani, Founder- WITHOUT

Founded by Anish Malpani in September 2020, WITHOUT makes daily-wear products out of impossible-to-recycle plastic, while empowering waste pickers. They’ve dedicated extensive effort to developing a solution for transforming waste into sunglasses.

Since its establishment, WITHOUT has employed waste pickers, predominantly women, significantly improving their livelihoods and increasing their pay twofold.

Around 30-60% of plastic waste in India is recycled, leaving out low-quality flexible plastics like chip packets which is often overlooked. Despite their challenges, WITHOUT aims to tackle these issues, starting with chips packets, to address genuine social and environmental concerns.

Anish Malpani, Founder- WITHOUT

Unlocking User Experience: WITHOUT’s Payment Challenge

WITHOUT looked for a payment solution that offered seamless onboarding and integration, enabling their team to focus on business expansion. Moreover, they aimed to partner with a market leader in the payments solutions space to foster trust among their customers.

Secondly, having experienced payment failures with other payment gateways, they needed a reliable solution to improve customer experience while boosting conversions.

WITHOUT, thus, partnered with PhonePe Payment Gateway to address key payment challenges. This decision was driven by PhonePe’s easy onboarding process, seamless integration, and robust support.

WITHOUT Sunglasses comes with a QR Code that tells the impact story of the glasses, revealing where the waste came from, which former waste-pickers worked on it, and how their lives have improved.

Driving Growth: PhonePe PG’s Impact on WITHOUT

With PhonePe Payment Gateway’s easy & quick onboarding and integration process, WITHOUT was able to start accepting payments in no time. Utilizing PhonePe’s 100% secure Payment Gateway and its leadership in the UPI space, WITHOUT fostered trust among its customers, leading to a rise in conversion rates.

Leveraging PhonePe PG’s proactive identification of potential downtime periods for payment methods, WITHOUT avoided transactions with low success probabilities, resulting in increased success rates.

As WITHOUT plans to expand its presence in the offline and corporate gifting sectors, they are looking forward to utilizing PhonePe PG’s Payment Links feature. This capability will allow them to effortlessly collect payments by generating and sharing links with their customers.

We’ve got a long way to go. We’re moving from the lab to our first demonstration plant, which is really important. There, we’ll test our technology on a larger scale and see how it works with supply and demand. Our goal is to expand this technology across India and the world so we can recycle more waste that’s currently not being recycled.

Anish Malpani, Founder- WITHOUT

Looking Ahead: WITHOUT’s Future

Referencing the future, Anish Malpani says, “This is just the beginning. We have a long way to go. Sunglasses alone won’t solve the waste problem or ease the struggles of waste pickers, but they serve as a proof of concept. We’re converting impossible-to-recycle plastic waste into high-quality materials and products while empowering waste pickers to achieve better livelihoods. Our long-term goal is to sell these materials to manufacturers.”