Purpose Before Profit: Leeatt Rothschild Of Packed With Purpose On The Benefits Of Running A Purpose-Driven Business
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
The beautiful thing about building a purpose-driven business is that growth and mission pull in the same direction. As long as we grow while staying true to what we stand for, more clients and more orders translate directly into greater impact on people and communities across the United States.
In today’s competitive business landscape, the race for profits often takes center stage. However, there are some leaders who also prioritize a mission-driven purpose. They use their business to make a positive social impact and recognize that success isn’t only about making money. In this interview series, we are talking with some of these distinct leaders and I had the pleasure of interviewing Leeatt Rothschild.
Leeatt Rothschild is the Founder and CEO of Packed with Purpose, a corporate gifting company that turns the everyday act of gifting into a force for good across the United States. Under her leadership, Packed with Purpose has channeled more than $9 million to purpose-driven makers, positively impacted over 2.6 million lives, and earned recognition as a Certified B Corporation and Woman-Owned business. A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay with degrees from Wesleyan University, the Wharton School, and the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Leeatt builds on a simple conviction: that business, done right, can turn everyday purchases into meaningful impact.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
It started on a cold, snowy day in Chicago, in the thick of the holiday season. I was working at a company and the office had filled up with the usual holiday gift baskets: brownies, cookies, towers of treats. All of it was delicious. But none of it made a real impact or contributed positively to communities across America.
At the time, I was consulting for chief sustainability officers and marketing executives, helping them create financial and social impact for their business. So I was spending my days thinking about how companies could do well and do good. Looking at all those holiday gifts made it clear something was missing.
What pulled at me most was the storytelling. I wanted to tell the stories behind the products- how items made by small makers and communities in need across the United States were doing good. That instinct goes back to my upbringing. My family traveled internationally often, and we’d seek out the markets and communities well beyond the obvious tourist cities. Connecting people and their stories to the products they made was something that always fascinated me.
I kept thinking there had to be a better corporate gift: one that was every bit as delicious and genuinely appreciated, but that also created real impact across the United States, supporting the people and communities behind each product. That’s when Packed with Purpose was born.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
Not long after I launched Packed with Purpose, I was watching TV and there was Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor at the time, on Windy City LIVE, gifting the host one of our gift boxes on national television. He talked about why this gift was different, and how it created an impact. I had no idea it was coming. I watched stunned, as one of our gifts was front and center on live TV; hearing the vision behind the business come out of someone else’s mouth was very powerful.
Then our website crashed. The traffic that morning was more than we were ready for, and the site briefly went down, something we scrambled to fix in real time. But even the crash was a thrill. There’s nothing quite like seeing the thing you built, and the reason you built it, suddenly come alive through someone else’s words.
We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?
When I launched Packed with Purpose through an initial Indiegogo campaign, we had an early commitment to send out a thousand or so gifts in early December. At the same time, I had just given birth to my twins and was traveling to the NICU every single day. So picture peak holiday season, a brand-new business, newborns in the hospital, and a thousand gifts that had to go out the door.
Then my part-time employee called: “It seems we have an issue.” Our warehouse team had flagged that the granola we’d special-ordered from one of our social enterprise Impact Partners (aka suppliers) arrived hard as a rock. How? Apparently our partner had stretched themselves thin over Thanksgiving, working overtime to produce everything we needed, and sealed the bags before the granola had time to cool. The result was granola that showed up hard as a brick and unusable for our gifts.
What I’m most grateful for is what happened next. Through a lot of fast communication and problem-solving between my warehouse team, our Impact Partner, and my employee, we found a solution that got every gift out on time and respected the mistake that had been made.
That experience taught me a lesson I’ve carried ever since: know your suppliers’ capacities, and understand whether your demands, or a sudden growth spurt, might push them past what they can deliver.
As a successful leader, it’s clear that you uphold strong core values. I’m curious what are the most important principles you firmly stand by and refuse to compromise on. Can you share a few of them and explain why they hold such significance for you in your work and life?
Several principles guide everything I do, both at Packed with Purpose and in my own life.
The first is: Go above and beyond. I never stop short of excellence. This is one of our company’s core values, and it matters because of what we actually do. As a gifting company, we’re fortunate to help our clients send gifts to the people who matter most to them. Every time someone chooses a Packed with Purpose gift, we have one chance to make that experience exceptional, and our team is committed to going the extra mile to get it right. Sometimes that means throwing in an extra treat when the moment calls for it, or picking up the phone to alert a client about a time-sensitive order. We want our clients to know that the entire team is focused on making both their experience and their recipient’s experience excellent.
The second is: ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ My father said this to me growing up, and it has stayed with me in my personal life and at work. Sometimes I’ll push my team and ask for something ambitious, and they’ll come back and tell me it’s too complicated or won’t work. Sometimes I’ll go out on a limb and ask someone for something, and the answer is simply no. But if I never ask, the door never opens, and those opportunities never materialize in the first place. So I always try to ask before I decide it can’t be done.
Conversely, when I do ask, great things can happen. I think back to how we landed one of our largest clients: it came from asking a current client for an introduction, even when it felt a bit out of reach. That single ask turned into a long-standing relationship and a six-figure order. It’s a reminder that the ask itself is what opens the door.
What inspired you to start a purpose-driven business rather than a traditional for-profit enterprise? Can you share a personal story or experience that led you to prioritize social impact in your business?
Long before Packed with Purpose, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay. While I was there, I helped a group of local farmers launch an income-generating fertilizer business. We built it from the ground up, and I watched what happened when families gained a new and reliable source of income. Beyond the farmers, many members of the community were artisans and, effectively, small business owners: they made and sold fresh cheese, straw hats, guava jam and more. Seeing how challenging it was for each maker to market and sell their products, despite how wonderful those products were, showed me the power of bringing unique items to market. When people learned about the artisans and the quality behind each good, they were eager to spend their money to support these makers.
That experience left a mark on me. I saw how commerce, done thoughtfully, can be one of the most powerful tools for lifting up a woman, her family, and by extension an entire community. It planted an idea that business and doing good don’t have to be separate pursuits. The most durable kind of “good” is the kind that’s built into how money already moves and the purchases we make every day.
Years later, when I looked at the corporate gifts piling up in our office over the holiday season, all of them lovely but none creating an impact, I recognized the same gap I’d seen in Paraguay. Here was an everyday act, gift-giving, that moved enormous sums of money but didn’t create a societal impact. I knew that could change. I built Packed with Purpose to embed impact into the everyday act of gifting, and to support the makers and communities behind every product.
Can you help articulate a few of the benefits of leading a purpose-driven business rather than a standard “plain vanilla” business?
The greatest benefit, by far, is the meaningful impact I know every one of our gifts carries. Not only for the recipient who receives it, but for the makers behind each product inside. When my team and I can feel the impact behind every treat, savory snack, and confection, there is an inherent thread of purpose running through all of our work.
That thread changes the nature of everything we do. Every client we serve, every product we buy, and every issue we troubleshoot allows a small business or nonprofit to do a little more good. A late shipment isn’t only a logistics problem to solve, it’s an order that helps put a smile on a recipient’s face. A new client isn’t only revenue, it’s more support flowing to the communities behind our products. The day-to-day work of running the business rarely feels transactional, because we feel how someone on the other end benefits.
And it shows up on both sides of the gift. A Packed with Purpose box brings joy or comfort to the person who opens it, and just as importantly, it lets the sender feel genuinely good about what they chose to give, rather than defaulting to something generic. That is a benefit a “plain vanilla” business can’t offer. The product does its job, and it does good at the same time. For me, knowing that our success is tied directly to the success of the makers and communities we work with is the most rewarding part of leading this kind of company.
How has your company’s mission or purpose affected its overall success? Can you explain the methods or metrics you use to evaluate the impact of this purpose-driven strategy on your organization?
Our mission hasn’t been separate from our success, it has been the engine of it. Purpose is the reason clients choose us, the reason our team stays, and the reason recipients remember the gift long after it’s opened.
We measure this in a few ways and create an annual Impact Report to document the positive impact our gifts continue to have. One metric is lives impacted: to date, our gifts have positively impacted more than 2.6 million lives through the small businesses, nonprofits, makers and families behind our products.
We also track our overall investment in our Impact Partners, our product suppliers. Since launch, we’ve invested over $9 million in purpose-driven and small businesses across the United States, and we’ve created 128,000 job training hours through the products we source.
Beyond these metrics, we’re always evaluating how our clients feel about working with us. I’m proud to say we have a 4.9 out of 5 rating across our customer base, and that speaks to our level of customer service and the care we provide across each and every order.
We also look at metrics like client retention and repeat orders. When clients come back season after season, and when recipients become buyers themselves, that’s the clearest proof that doing good and doing well reinforce each other.
Can you share a pivotal moment when you realized that leading your purpose-driven company was actually making a significant impact? Can you share a specific example or story that deeply resonated with you personally?
For me, the pivotal moment didn’t come from a sales milestone or an award. It came from a message I received from one of our Impact Partners, one of the makers behind the products in our gifts.
They wrote to thank me, and told me: “I’ll never forget that first random call from one of your staff, inquiring about 10,000 bags of cookies. That was our largest order at the time, and it was a source of validation. Your team has ordered from us consistently since then. Thank you.”
Reading that made me pause and appreciate the incredible impact we have had on small businesses and organizations across the country. When my team placed that order, we were simply sourcing a wonderful product for our gifts. We had no idea that a single call had become the largest order this business had ever received, or that it had affirmed for them that what they were building mattered.
That was the moment the mission became real to me in a way that a metric can’t really capture. It showed me that every gift we send sets off a ripple far beyond the recipient who opens the box. Behind that gift is a small business that can hire another person, take on another order, and keep doing the good work they set out to do. Knowing our growth is directly tied to theirs is the most meaningful kind of impact I could ask for, and it’s exactly why I built Packed with Purpose.
Have you ever faced a situation where your commitment to your purpose and creating a positive social impact clashed with the profitability in your business? Have you ever been challenged by anyone on your team or have to make a tough decision that had a significant impact on finances? If so, how did you address and reconcile this conflict?
I navigate this trade-off constantly. Buying from small makers and nonprofits can be more expensive, less predictable, and require greater operational coordination than sourcing from large, conventional suppliers. A bigger supplier can offer lower prices, faster turnarounds, and fewer surprises. On paper, choosing them would certainly enhance our margins.
But that would undermine the very essence of the business. A Packed with Purpose gift without impact isn’t a Packed with Purpose gift. The makers and organizations behind our products are the reason we exist, so sourcing from them is non-negotiable, even when it costs us more and, at times, asks more of our team.
In practice, that means we’ve absorbed certain operational constraints to keep our brand promise. Small makers don’t always have the capacity of a large manufacturer, and we’ve had orders where an Impact Partner’s limitations created genuine challenges for our team. Communicating openly and often has let us troubleshoot smartly and find solutions that work for both sides. We choose to work through the hard moments and find our margin elsewhere, through efficiency, smart pricing, and scale, rather than by removing the impact from our gifts.
Profitability matters, and we work hard for it, but we earn it because of our mission, never at its expense. That discipline has made us a harder business to run, and a far more meaningful one to lead.
What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs who wish to start a purpose-driven business?
The best advice I can give applies to any entrepreneur: don’t wait until you have the perfect solution to launch.
So many founders wait, polishing an idea until they’re certain it’s just right. But certainty doesn’t come from planning. It comes from putting something in front of real customers. Start from an imperfect place on purpose, because that’s how you get feedback on the things that actually determine whether your business will work: your pricing, your offering, the way you communicate, and the way people respond.
I launched Packed with Purpose through an Indiegogo campaign, long before everything was figured out. It was far from perfect, but it taught me more in one season than months of planning ever could. That early start was a gift in itself: the problems that surfaced were small, which let me solve them before we were shipping 10x the volume in the months ahead. The sooner you get something into the world, the sooner your customers will tell you what’s working and what needs to be tweaked, and they are far better teachers than your own assumptions.
For purpose-driven founders especially, this matters because your mission may be the very thing that drives people to consider and buy. The only way to know whether that assumption holds is to put a real product or service in front of customers and let their feedback prove it out.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Purpose-Driven Business.” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
1. A versatile, mission-aligned team. Not just talented people. A lot of those exist in the world. But people who have the skills you need and who specifically want to apply those skills to a mission. I’ve learned that our best colleagues are those who have a certain skill set, are versatile and eager to adapt as the business evolves (read: start-up life is fast changing), and who have a deep conviction in our mission, which powers their creativity, problem solving, and genuine desire to make the business successful.
2. Core values that actually guide decisions. Values that live in hiring, client communication and hard calls, not on a poster. I loved the way we built our core values by surveying our team and identifying the values that our most admired team members exemplified. We use those values in real decisions, from hard conversations with clients to weighing operational constraints when there’s no perfect answer.
3. Mission built into the economics, not bolted on. The impact has to be structural, treated as integral to the business, or it gets cut the first time margins tighten. Being clear on this from day one has allowed us to maintain our incredible roster of Impact Partners, even when tariffs or shifting customer trends put pressure on the business.
4. Open communication, especially with our suppliers. Your business is only as strong as the makers behind it, and trust is what gets you through thorny problems. When 1,000+ bags of granola arrived hard as a rock, we were able to problem solve in real time because we treated our suppliers as the true partners that they are.
5. Stay adaptable and willing to evolve the business. Your purpose should stay fixed, but many other aspects of the business will keep changing. For us, some of our best evolutions have come directly from customer feedback. As clients told us what they wanted, we refined our packaging and expanded our line of PwP Treats to better match what people want in their gifts. We didn’t dream those changes up in a vacuum, we built them in response to real requests, and the business is stronger for it. The mission never changes, but how we deliver on it should always be open to getting better.
I’m interested in how you instill a strong sense of connection with your team. How do you nurture a culture where everyone feels connected to your mission? Could you share an example or story that showcases how your purpose has positively influenced or motivated people on your team to contribute?
Connection to our mission isn’t something I can mandate, so we build it into the everyday rhythm of our work.
It starts with who we hire. From the very beginning, we hire for mission alignment. When someone joins because they genuinely care about the impact we create, the connection is there on day one. And importantly, it persists on the days when real challenges arise and we need to find an elegant way through.
We also keep the impact visible. It’s easy to lose sight of why the work matters when someone is heads-down in inventory forecasting, website updates, or customer support. So we regularly share the stories behind our Impact Partners and the difference our gifts make, through our annual Impact Report and through a Slack channel we call “PwP Love,” where anyone can post positive feedback from clients, recipients, and Impact Partners. When the team can see that an order helped a small business grow or made an employee appreciation event stand out, the work carries greater meaning.
Nowhere was that clearer than a few years ago, when we ran into a major fulfillment issue during peak holiday season. Sorting through the shipping problems was exhausting, and it stretched the whole team. Our Operations and Customer Support teams worked long hours, following up with every client and making sure no concern went unanswered. The team’s dedication was incredible. It wasn’t only about troubleshooting orders. It was about protecting the experience for our clients, the recipients on the other end, and the impact behind every gift. Their commitment to our mission is what powered those long hours.
Imagine we’re sitting down together two years from now, looking back at your company’s last 24 months. What specific accomplishments would have to happen for you to be happy with your progress?
Growth. At the end of the day, I’m running a business, and growing it is part of the fun and the excitement. But for a purpose-driven company, growth is never just about the numbers. It inherently means we’re creating more impact.
Over the next two years, I’d like to see that growth show up in a few specific ways: in the number of clients we serve, in the size of the orders we take on, and in the expansion of our gifts to everyday consumer gifters. That means diversifying beyond the corporate gift givers who have been our foundation. Broadening into that consumer market is a real opportunity, and I’d be proud to see it become a meaningful part of our business.
The beautiful thing about building a purpose-driven business is that growth and mission pull in the same direction. As long as we grow while staying true to what we stand for, more clients and more orders translate directly into greater impact on people and communities across the United States. That’s the kind of progress that would make me happy to look back on: a bigger business, and a bigger footprint of good.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
If I could inspire one movement, it would be this: that every purchase we make, as individuals and as companies, becomes a chance to do good.
We spend money every single day, on gifts, on groceries, on the things that fill our homes and offices. Most of that spending does just one job: it meets a need. But imagine if even a fraction of it flowed toward the makers, small businesses, and communities creating real good in the world. The collective impact would be staggering, especially in our own backyard, across the United States.
This is the belief at the heart of Packed with Purpose, and it goes back to what I saw in Paraguay. Once people knew the maker and the story behind a product, they wanted to spend their money to support them. The desire is already there. It just has to be made easy and visible.
So my movement is simple: make impact the default, not the exception. If every company rethought even one routine purchase, and every consumer chose products that intentionally do good, we would channel an extraordinary amount of money toward the people who need it most, producing outsized outcomes. We don’t have to choose between what we want and doing good. We just have to decide that every dollar can do more
How can our readers further follow your work or your company online?
I often share my entrepreneurial reflections on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/leeatt-pwp. You can explore our gifts and impact at packedwithpurpose.gifts, and follow Packed with Purpose on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/company/packedwpurpose) and Instagram (@packedwpurpose).
Thank you so much for the time and the very inspiring insights. We wish you continued success!
About The Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
Purpose Before Profit: Leeatt Rothschild Of Packed With Purpose On The Benefits Of Running A… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.