FOLO-UP is an acronym for Flagging Online Listings of Unsafe Products.

FOLO-UP envisages a world where selling unsafe, non-compliant and counterfeit products is uneconomic. To this end, we support regulators and manufacturer associations in reporting on the extent of such products and removing them from sale. We also provide tools to private individuals, and micro/small businesses, to help them avoid purchasing these products in the first place.

The FOLO-UP platform provides impartial, free information to help reduce the circulation of unsafe products online. We work constructively with regulators, industry bodies, and online marketplaces, but we are not part of the UK Government and do not provide official regulatory guidance.

Unsafe, non-compliant, and counterfeit products are disproportionate sources of injury, property damage, and insurance claims. Their low prices make it hard for responsible manufacturers to compete and for vendors competing on price to avoid. We level this playing field.

FOLO-UP is operated by Irelco Ltd, a private independent software development company that builds safety focused web products. FOLO-UP is the company’s flagship platform for marketplace safety intelligence, with sub-projects strengthening compliance outcomes and powering the data engine.

FOLO-UP’s business is about enforcing certain ethical behaviours in retail. We will ultimately force manufacturers supplying to the UK market to be ethical by default. We will make it harder to sell products that are only cheap because they are made outside of the UK and don’t conform to UK safety standards. Our approach has the effect of doing due diligence on products for those vendors who are failing in their responsibility to only sell safe and compliant products. As such, our approach also reduces the available sales channels in the UK for unethical overseas manufacturers.

As a bootstrapping start-up, it is easy to get used to utilising the skills of people who are prepared to do some work for free. We undertake to ensure that anyone working for us is paid for their work as soon as we receive funding or secure a client.

Our principal business will have a number of positive effects on the environment. Products that fail due to poor quality manufacturing will likely end up in landfill. Preventing those products from being sold will reduce the amount of plastic and metal going to landfill. Furthermore, as we push further back down the supply chain, the products never get shipped to the UK in the first place, reducing the portion of transport-related CO2e they are responsible for. Ultimately, with the UK being the third largest online market by volume (after China and the US), we hope to reduce the number of these plastic and metal products being manufactured, thereby also reducing manufacturing-related CO2e.

As a technology business, AI is unavoidable. We are constantly monitoring the available tools for those that offer more efficient use of resources and do not rely on military and intelligence contracts to prop up their businesses. Additionally, once FOLO-UP is trading, we undertake to donate to charities working to offset the negative effects of AI/data-warehouses (as part of 1% for the Planet) and also invest in fellow start-ups developing technologies that reduce the resource requirements of data warehouses and AI more generally.