Altadena, CA, after the Eaton Fire. Photo via Wikimedia Commons · CC0
Our mission
The news cycle ends.
Recovery doesn't.
The Disaster After exists to close the gap between the week a town makes headlines and the years it takes its small businesses to come back.
Why this company
Everyone helps on day one.
We're built for day one hundred.
After a disaster, the country is generous — for about a week. Donations pour in, volunteers show up, the cameras roll. Then attention moves to the next story, and the small businesses that anchor these towns face the quiet part alone: a shop full of inventory, a community with no money to spend, and a long wait on insurance and aid.
We watched that happen and saw something everyone was missing. Those shelves aren't a loss waiting to be written off — they're a story the whole country would show up for, if someone put it in front of them. Live shopping has proven that people will rally around a person, a story, and a countdown clock. Nobody has pointed that energy at disaster recovery.
So that's what we're building: a team that shows up in the after, does the work an exhausted owner can't, and turns surviving inventory into the first dollars of a comeback.
What we believe
Commerce beats charity
A donation helps once. A customer helps forever. We'd rather build shops a national audience than a GoFundMe.
Stories carry towns
Every shop we work with gets its story told with dignity — filmed honestly, never exploited. The story is the engine; the owner is the hero.
Show up in person
Recovery doesn't happen over email. We go to the towns, stand in the shops, and do the physical work beside the people we serve.
The long game
Where this goes.
We're starting with a founding cohort of businesses and live auctions on Whatnot. But the vision is bigger: a standing recovery operation that corporate partners fund and amplify, a permanent bridge between disaster-hit main streets and the customers who want to help them — and, one day, these comeback stories told on the biggest screens we can reach.
None of that is signed. All of it is why we get up in the morning. If you want to help build it, start here.
Join the founding cohort
Be one of the businesses
that proves this works.
The first shops we work with aren't customers — they're co-founders of the model. Tell us your story.