Crown Invitation — Let’s Go Shopping

Dear Ms. Laughton,

We are inviting you to wear the Crown Marketplace Steward of Liana Banyan Initiative #3 — Let’s Go Shopping. This is a working seat at the head of a cooperative marketplace that we have already begun to build. If the rest of this letter composes with the operating philosophy you have spent your career proving out, we would welcome a reply at any temperature — full interest, conditional, decline-with-feedback, or silence.

Your run at Sephora’s digital arm and then as CEO of Athleta made one pattern legible across two very different categories: a retail brand can be operated as if customers are members rather than marks, and the financial result is durable rather than thin. The Athleta turn — sustainability commitments that survived a quarterly cycle, B-Corp certification kept rather than abandoned, a community of women treated as participants in the brand rather than targets of it — is the operator track record this Initiative needs.

What Liana Banyan is, structurally

Liana Banyan is a member-sovereign cooperative substrate. The terms are canonical:

  • Membership is $5/year.
  • Creators may earn 83.3% of what they earn on the platform.
  • Margin on goods and services routed through the substrate is held to Cost+20% — a hard ceiling, not a target.
  • No advertising layer. No data resale. No engagement-extraction machinery.

The Corporation (Wyoming, 2025-11-21) holds 19 USPTO provisional patent applications filed protecting the substrate primitives. The substrate is built to serve 16 Initiatives. Each Initiative is led by a Crown — a person whose body of work has already proved the cooperative thesis in their own field. The Crown is a working seat, not a figurehead.

The Let’s Go Shopping Initiative

Amazon and the big-box layer captured the discovery surface and the margin in one motion. Liana Banyan returns both to members. Cost+20% is the ceiling for goods routed through the substrate — there is no version of “scale” that breaks that floor. The Initiative is the wealth-retention class: the dollar spent at a Liana Banyan vendor stays within four hops of the buyer, where the same dollar at the extraction-class marketplace exits the local economy within two.

The structural premise is a multi-stakeholder cooperative where artisans, small manufacturers, independent retailers, and member-buyers share governance and surplus. The math is the math — a marketplace where the operator is not paid by surveillance and not compensated by dark patterns has to win on the operator’s actual skill at building the surface. That is the operator job you have already done, twice.

The Crown Marketplace Steward seat

The Crown is the working operator authority for the Initiative. Practically:

  • Sets the vendor standard — sourcing, labor, environmental — and the cooperative-employment floor for vendors who route through the substrate.
  • Shapes the discovery and search surface without the dark-pattern playbook retail has normalized as default.
  • Vets the early waves of Marketplace cooperatives as they onboard.
  • Represents the Initiative to the operator community that has watched extraction-class retail and waited for a credible alternative.

What the substrate gives you is the cooperative scale Athleta could only approach inside a Gap-corporate envelope. A member base that has already opted into a different value exchange. A no-ads, no-data-resale operating premise that you do not have to argue for inside a board meeting because it is the substrate’s constitutional floor — written into the Wyoming filings, attested to in the patent provisionals, and structurally hard-wired into the cooperative compact.

What you bring is the operator credibility that turns “cooperative marketplace” from a phrase into a real go-to-market. The Sephora and Athleta networks that open the artisan and small-brand recruitment lane. The B-Corp / sustainability seriousness that means you will hold the Cost+20% line when scale pressure pushes against it — and you have run inside the kind of corporate envelope where that pressure shows up first.

Composition with the other Initiatives

The Crown Marketplace Steward sits at the marketplace center of the consumer-goods cluster:

  • #2 Let’s Get Groceries (Stacy Mitchell, LOCKED) — groceries upstream
  • #1 Let’s Make Dinner (Maneet Chauhan, OFFERED) — prepared food adjacent
  • #4 Household Concierge (Marie Kondo, LOCKED) — household curation alongside
  • #16 Brass Tacks (Dale Dougherty, PENDING) — maker-class production feeding inventory

Seated together, these five Crowns describe a full cooperative consumer economy where the buyer’s dollar circulates inside the member network rather than escaping it. Your Crown holds the marketplace surface — the place where members actually transact.

The ask

If the cooperative thesis here composes with the operator work you are already carrying, we would welcome a conversation. We can send a Crown briefing dossier and arrange a walk-through of the substrate operator stack at your convenience. A reply at the substrate’s founder email, or any contact channel you prefer, is enough to open it.

For the Keep.

— Jonathan R. Jones Founder & General Manager · Liana Banyan Corporation U.S. Army National Guard (Ret.) · Father of 8 Founder@LianaBanyan.com · lianabanyan.com

There is a walkthrough at lianabanyan.com/RedCarpet. No scheduling, no pitch deck, no salesman.

Help Each Other Help Ourselves.