Community
As human beings, we need a sense of belonging, and that sense of belonging is what connects us to the many relationships we develop.
The Markups.Org Community is a vital source of information about the health of a business. In addition to acting as ambassadors for a product or service, our community also gives you valuable market research insights and information for product development. It can even help your business attract and retain top talent.
Authenticity
We live and lead in our truest, most authentic form.
We aim to strip down layers, gates, and walls to encourage our community to build strong rapport and trusting relationships at scale.
We embrace difficult conversations and highlight new opportunities, activities, and events that allow our community to hold those around them accountable.
Through integrity and transparent feedback, we enable consumers and organizations to form authentic bonds.
Innovation
Markups.Org is destined to stay on the cutting edge of where technology and data meets retail; we recognize that creative innovation is the heartbeat of our business and the industries we serve.
Through quality data and analytics, we will continue to disrupt and reshape the manufacturer/ retailer/ consumer affiliations.
Which will ultimately improve the customer experience and produce lifelong advocates, becoming fundamental to our industry’s economic success.
Empathy
We facilitate positive relationships by identifying, understanding, and segmenting the wants, needs, and viewpoints of consumers through data.
Through its consumer insights, we will reduce consumer/ brand friction, foster industry productivity and best practices, and enable strong collaboration between all segments of our platform users.
Empathy will pave the way for our community to build
trust and repair poor perceived industry standards and practices.
trust and repair poor perceived industry standards and practices.
The Crew
Markups.Org is a bootstrap effort driving change by disrupting entire industries through crowdsourcing consumer data— the foundation of our business and our competitive advantage.
We are a team of engineer innovators, tech wizards, and marketing experts using consumer data to bring people together to advocate and support each other in the fight to overcome industry and economic threats.
Tiffany Soucie-Howren
CoFounder & COO
Tiffany created her first website and started her first business at 16 years old. She is a servant leader with a passion for enabling and inspiring people, teams, organizations, and communities to grow and evolve. Known as a honey-badger, she consistently drives action and progress.
Dorothy Funderburk-Soucie
Support Administrator
Dorothy has navigated alongside Trey and Tiffany since the dawn of the companies' inception and remains Markups’ number one fan. Her attention to detail and diligence amplifies the consumer viewpoints and enables dealerships transparency and fairness within the platform.
The Mission
Affecting positive change between consumers, retailers, manufacturers, industry professionals, and the communities they are in.
The Vision
Technology that enables transparency, keeping markets free and competitive.
The Origin Story
The motivation for Markups.org was born from an awful experience the co-founder Trey Soucie, had when shopping for a new truck in 2021. Like many other Americans over the past year or so, he got caught in a bait and switch offer.
Trey had recently purchased a new 2021 Tahoe z71 for below MSRP, right off the lot in Portsmouth, NH. A few months later he was looking to trade in his 2016 tundra for the new Chevrolet Trail Boss truck. After finding one in stock and listed online at MSRP, he called to confirm availability. Once confirmed he set out with his wife Dorothy to buy this prospective truck.
He took the 3 hour drive up to the Chevrolet dealership and spent a few hours getting his trade-in valued, test driving the new truck, and then finally sitting down with the finance manager. He was given a sheet of paper with the trade-in value and the total price of the truck.
It didn’t click right away that the price on this new sheet was 10k over what it said online… but something seemed off- the numbers didn’t add up. So, he asked for the Monroney label since they weren’t displaying it. After repetitively asking for it and receiving looks of bewilderment from the manager, they finally pulled out the folded-up window sticker that had been tucked away. Now having this he was able to inspect it, and that’s when he realized the price was indeed indicative of a 10k markup on the new offer presented.
Trey was a bit aggravated at this point and informed the finance manager that there was no way he was willing to pay the hidden markup. The finance manager got annoyed and rudely informed Trey that he would not be taking this truck home for MSRP. So, Trey got up, asked for his tundra keys back, and then left. In total, he and his wife had burned an entire day dealing with this flop of a truck purchase.
This began Trey’s quest for finding a dealership that would sell at or below MSRP, or a minimum be transparent about pricing, thus our mission was born to help prevent other consumers from going through this turmoil.
From that day on, Trey started collecting data sets in various google docs and sharing them on car forums: Original Google Docs Spreadsheet
He reached out to his sister, Tiffany Soucie-Howren, to help turn his idea of a single site of markups data into a platform that could potentially be market disrupting. Her background in founding and scaling businesses, her knowledge and understanding of consumer data, and her SaaS marketing and product development expertise, made her an easy choice.
Trey took the plunge in December 2021 to buy the hosting and start building the crowdsourcing software. In January 2022 they officially founded Markups, LLC and launched into public beta in March 2022, with plans to launch their MVP in late 2022.