Abbey Post is a plus-size fashion marketplace and community. The company just released a totally rebuilt version of the site, which now features an internal social network and expanded inventory. It takes an Etsy-style approach where anyone, from independent designers to established brands, can sell their wares.

“I chose this model of peer-to-peer commerce specifically because I want to build community,” Schames said in an interview. “Plus-size women feel really disenfranchised, neglected, and left out of conversations about fashion. There are many people who think fat ladies aren’t sexy and don’t care what they look like, even though there are over 100 million plus-size women in the US. If you give them a platform to connect over fashion and buy clothes that make them feel good, that math adds up real fast.”

After leaving her sales job, Schames gained e-commerce experience by founding an online consignment store for luxury accessories. She is a plus-size women herself and was drawn to handbags and jewelry because they are size agnostic. As a professional in New York City, she said it was consistently difficult to find plus-size clothing because a lot of brands are pulling their plus-size clothes out of stores and moving sales entirely online. However, none of the online retailers provided particularly appealing options and none incorporated the social element that makes shopping enjoyable for many women. Schames repeatedly had conversations with women who felt marginalized in the same way and realized there was a bigger opportunity out there.

“I’m not sure who told people that size 14 and up love polyester, but it’s not true,” she said. “Plus-size women are tired of going to the mall and looking through two abandoned racks in the back. Fashion is aspirational and today’s runway model averages a size zero. That does not reflect a majority of women. The fashion industry wants to fetishize thinness and sell us this fantasy, but it’s not real life and it pisses me off. I have a daughter and I don’t want her growing up feeling bad because she isn’t like the magazine. Part of our mission is telling women it is OK to love who you are. I am working hard to bring a positive and accepting and inclusive environment to normal women.”

Social e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce are trendy right now and changing the experience of shopping online. The e-commerce sector didn’t see too much innovation for many years — brands and retailers put their inventory online and shoppers searched for what they were looking for. Recently, a wave of fashion startups such as Wanelo, Luvocracy, Etsy, Poshmark, and Polyvore have taken various approaches to transforming this experience and finding new ways to browse and buy products online. At a recent media dinner about social e-commerce, Angel List founder Naval Ravikant (who is an investor in Wanelo) said this is the future of shopping.

Abbey Post is using these new models to target an underserved and highly valuable market. It is a passion project that addresses a widespread and unique set of needs. There are other plus-size online retailers out there like Avenue.com, Fashion to Figure, SimpleBe, Jessica London, and OneStopPlus, but Schames said her focus on high-end clothing and her social approach sets AbbeyPost apart. She also said there are products and features in the pipeline that will make Abbey Post an innovative tech company, rather than just a tech-enabled one.

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

Namshi features clothing, accessories, and footwear for women, men, and kids from over 550 international and local brands. Like Zappos, the sites offers free shipping and a flexible return policy. The site serves the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain.

According to a statement issued this morning, Namshi has experienced significant growth in the region and this financing will ramp up operations and support the move to a new, state-of-the-art warehouse and distribution center.

The Internet and e-commerce are exploding in emerging markets around the world. Rocket Internet capitalizes on this momentum by incubating and accelerating clone companies based on popular models, like Amazon, Zappos, and Groupon. Its portfolio includes Asian e-commerce portal Lazada, African online retailers Zando and Jumia, Europe-focused Zalando, and Brazil’s Dafiti.

Summit Partners is an active investor in these of companies and participated in the financing of Lazada, Zando, Jumia, and Dafiti as well as Colombian seller of consumer electronics Linio. Before this round, Namshi raised money from Investment AB Kinnevik, JP Morgan Chase, Blakeney Managament, and Holtzbrink Ventures. JP Morgan also likes startups like these and is an investor in Lazada, Dafiti and Zalando.

These deep pockets combined with Rocket Internet’s vision are a major force bringing e-commerce to the whole world. Next up, perhaps, is an e-commerce portal for Antarctica featuring the latest in extreme cold weather fashion.

Photo credit: Eugene Kaspersky/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For many of us, shopping is about desire and the quest for products to fall in love with. Wanelo released the third version of its mobile application today to make online shopping a pleasurable and personal experience “for everyone.”

Wanelo is a social shopping app that has a community of eight million dedicated users. People collect items that they “want, need, or love” to save and share on their profile, so it’s similar to Pinterest.  Unlike Pinterest, Wanelo is intended to drive e-commerce. Clicking an image prompts you to save the item or redirects you where you can buy it. You can follow brands, designers, and stores that you love as well as other Wanelo community members (or build up a following of your own).

This makes Wanelo is a potential goldmine for things like kitschy home goods and inexpensive, on-trend apparel.

“E-commerce is exploding, yet the market has remained primitive,” said founder Deena Varshavskaya in an interview. “We make sense of the world through the people around us, and we have a social network for every basic human need except shopping. When we look at a piece of content, we want to know who created it, who likes or hates it, who uses it, and so on.

“That’s what Wanelo is building.”

Rather than ad-retargeting or recommendation engines, Wanelo uses social networking to find products you may like. Every member has an activity feed, and last year Wanelo introduced a trending feature that reigned in its “first wave of success.” The latest version puts the personalized feed at the forefront of the user experience, so opening up Wanelo instantly provides a variety of products from sources curated by the user, making it “even more dangerous for getting lost.”

The system includes products from over 200,000 stores, including major retailers like Urban Outiftters and Nasty Gal as well as small independent shops like Etsy sellers. The more stores and people you follow, the “smarter” your feed gets. Users are spending an average of 50 minutes per day on Wanelo, and over five million products are saved eight million times a day.

At a recent media dinner that Wanelo hosted, the company’s investors spoke about how significant the traction, growth, and levels of engagement are for the startup, but also for the world of e-commerce. Varshavskaya said Wanelo’s mission is to “democratize and transform the world’s commerce by reorganizing shopping around people.”

There are millions upon millions of products for sale on the Internet and they are difficult to search through. Wanelo is building a “meta-layer” on top of e-commerce to improve the process of finding stuff to want, need, and love. Wanelo’s investors, which include Floodgate, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant of Angel List, and Forerunner Ventures, see this as the future of shopping.

Wanelo is based in San Francisco and has raised $3 million.

Photo Credit: Wanelo

The U.S. Senate voted today to pass a bill that would require large e-commerce companies to collect sales taxes from all of their U.S. customers.

The bill, known as the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (S. 743), passed the Senate by a vote of 69 to 27 (with 4 Senators not voting).

It now goes to the House of Representatives, where it may face a tougher battle.

The bill imposes a single federal standard requiring all retailers with more than $1 million in online transactions to collect the sales tax required by whatever locality the buyer happens to be in. States would have to do their part by setting up a single entity for sales tax collection and providing a single sales tax return form for retailers to use in reporting tax payments, greatly simplifying the process.

We’ve been expecting this bill to pass for awhile.

So the bill is mixed news for e-commerce fans. For customers, that means they’ll have to pay sales tax even if they didn’t before. For online retailers, it means they’ll have to collect sales taxes for a variety of jurisdictions — but the process will be simpler.

Right now, there’s a patchwork of different state and local laws governing e-commerce. Technically, e-retailers are supposed to collect sales tax in many locations. In reality, not many do: In California, only 1.4 percent of online transactions included the required sales tax.

Some online retailers, such as eBay, have stridently opposed the bill, while others, such as Amazon, are in favor. (Amazon earlier fought, and lost, a battle to keep from collecting sales tax from its California customers.)

Brick-and-mortar retailers supported the bill, viewing it as a way to cut down on “showrooming,” where customers visit physical showrooms to check out the latest products, then go online to purchase them at lower prices. The U.S. governor’s association also supported the bill.

CNN has a handy overview of the bill’s main points and what it will mean for you.

Here’s the full text of S. 743.

Corrected 6:06pm: The bill goes next to the House, not to the President.

Photo credit: kenteegardin/SeniorLiving.org via photopin cc

PhiSix launched its 3D simulation solution today that allows people to virtually try-on clothing before hitting “buy.”

Founders Jon Su and Jatin Chhugani earned Ph.Ds in computer science from Stanford and Johns Hopkins, respectively. Both men felt the pain of shopping online and rather than just dealing with uncertainty and returns (like most of us), they decided to leverage their expertise to digitalize one of the most important steps of shopping

“Despite all of the advancements we have seen in the past 10 years, we are really at the very beginning of apparel e-commerce,” said founder Jon Su to VentureBeat. “It would be great if we could purchase our clothes online without any doubts, but we really can’t at this point because it is too hard to find the right fit. Our goal with PhiSix is to change this.”

The proprietary technology digitizes articles of clothing from a two-dimensional photograph. Users provide basic information about their bodies and measurements and the engine will drape the 3D garment on an avatar using a physics-based simulation. From there, consumers can look at a 360 degree view, watch the clothing on a simulated catwalk, and check out a virtual fitting room. E-commerce retailers can integrate the technology into their sites with one line of code in an effort to improve conversion rates, drive sales, and cut down on returns.

Su’s background is in physics-based animation and cloth simulation, and Chhugani’s expertise is in interactive computer graphics, virtual reality, computational geometry, and high-performance computation. Together, they have developed advanced technology that maintains high visual quality, as well as customization, and scaleability. Competitors include Fites.me, True Fit, Clothes Horse, Metail, and Styku, but Su said PhiSix is better than its rivals because it can digitize and simulate garments 10 times more rapidly at prices three to five times lower than its competitors.

While e-commerce is growing, it is still dwarfed by brick-and-mortar retail, and abandoned online shopping carts are common. Part of this is due to consumer uncertainty about fit and hesitancy to buy something before trying it on. PhiSix seeks to bridge this gap between the online and offline world by creating a virtual fitting room experience. However, as with many fashion/apparel startups, success doesn’t only hedge on technology. It also requires understanding the personal and often illogical process of selecting and sampling clothing.

No matter how advanced the engine or how realistic the avatars, it may take more than 3D modeling to encourage someone to buy a pair of skinny jeans online.

During initial testing, PhiSix has digitized over 10,000 garments and over 6,000 user avatars have been created. The company is working with clients like the Tie Society and Le Tote as well as “large international e-commerce retailers,” and the tech is being used at “several major Hollywood studios.” PhiSix was founded in 2012 and the six employees are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NEW YORK CITY — “Pivot” tends to be a dirty world in the tech world. When companies pivot, it’s usually because they messed up somewhere, and they tend not to hold press events flaunting their shift in focus.

Fab, however, isn’t like most companies. What began as Fabulis, a social network for gay men, has rapidly turned into one of the biggest e-commerce sites around. And, somehow, Fab isn’t content with that success: The company announced today that’s pivoting away from the world of flash sales to become something very different but far more interesting: it’s very own design store.

“We want to build something really massive — like at an Ikea scale. We think we can create the Ikea or Amazon of design,” Fab CEO Jason Goldberg said at Fab’s New York City headquarters yesterday.

To push this new strategy, Fab has revamped the design and structure of its online store and apps, all of which are now focused on distinct product verticals like “Art”, “Vintage”, “Jewelry” and “Men.” (As Goldberg would say, it’s Amazon with a soul.)

The new Fab is also particularly friendly to e-window shoppers, who can browse the site’s new designer pages and exclusive product listings. Fab has also improved the power of its search engine, which is built so that users are at most two or three clicks from finding what they’re looking for.

Welcome to the store-ification of Fab.

The new Fab will heavily push the site exclusive products.

It goes deeper. Alongside the redesign, Fab also announced its purchase of Massivkonzept, a German bespoke furniture company whose acquisition ties in with another one of Fab’s new grand ambitions: to carve its own chunk out of the online customizable furniture business. “Online furniture retail is ripe for disruption. We think it’s possible to bring fun, modern, quirky products to people on a large scale,” Goldberg said.

With the acquisition of Massivkonzept, Fab also announced that it’s building its first retail store in Hamburg, Germany. Unsurprisingly, the company’s brick-and-mortar goals are no less ambitious than its online ones. ”We’re going to reinvent, we’re going to disrupt, we’re going to re-imagine what retail can be,” said Goldberg, who revealed that Fab also plans to open more retail locations this year.

This is all really tough to take in. But as sudden as it all seems from the outside, Fab’s pivot has actually been over a year in the making. “In January 2012, we said that if we wanted to get to where we wanted to, we had to change the course of our business. Our pivot has been slow — but is indeed a pivot,” Goldberg told me.

But while Fab seems to be pulling this pivot off pretty well so far, Goldberg was quick to agree that running a store is very different from running a flash sales site. Suddenly, you find yourself worrying about things like building warehouses, managing inventory, and offering exclusive products that people actually care about. And none of that’s particularly easy.

One thing that Fab did not talk about, however, was its rumored round of funding, which was valued as high as $ 1 billion. “We’re overwhelmed by investor interest in Fab. What we’re looking for in terms of investors are people who can to help us spread this brand and take it all around the world, ” said Goldberg, asking reporters to “stay tuned” for future announcements on the subject.

“We’re in this for the long term,” he added.

The startup launched today with the mission of “streamlining and simplifying” e-commerce. On the site, you find a range of products and categories. If you see something you like, such as an LED light pillow, a soft-service ice cream maker, or J. Crew silk blouse, you hit the “tiks” button to save the item for later. You can also create alerts for future deals, share items with friends, or go directly to the original sale site. In addition to products, it also deals on experiences and services like yoga classes or house cleaning.

“Most online shoppers spend too much time browsing different online shops in search of a product they are looking for,” said founder Raffi Keuhnelian in an email. “By combining flash sales, product search, and daily deals, users can actually find what they are looking for.” 

Rather than the daily deals email model, which many consumers have grown tired of, TikTatkTo’s approach is to put all the deals on one page that updates in real-time based on the users’ location. The technology also learns from the users behavior to recommend products, and the “popular,” “new arrivals,” and “best sellers” sections help with product discovery.

E-commerce is an increasingly crowded space as companies big and small attempt to create the ultimate online shopping experience. Some sites like Amazon offer vast inventories and low prices, while companies like Polyvore and Wanelo take more curated, social approaches. Groupon and Living Social inspired a dozens of fellow daily deal startups, and then there are web extensions like Honey that crawl the web for coupon codes and tries them for you automatically.

TikTakTo is the latest startup to join the fray by taking bits and pieces of all these approaches to provide aggregation, curation, social feeds, and discounts all in one.

The company is based in Montreal, Canada and currently has 10 employees.

Photo credit: eilowny/Flickr

The U.S. Senate voted to limit debate on a measure that would require e-commerce retailers to collect local sales tax.

That means the bill, S. 743, will move to a vote later this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday. Today’s vote was 74-20, which suggests strong support for the bill, and that means it’s likely to be headed to the President’s desk.

Right now, there’s a patchwork of different state and local laws governing e-commerce. Technically, e-retailers are supposed to collect sales tax in many locations. In reality, not many do: In California, only 1.4 percent of online transactions included the required sales tax.

The bill, also known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, would impost a single federal standard requiring all retailers with more than $1 million in online transactions to collect the sales tax required by whatever locality the buyer happens to be in. States would have to do their part by setting up a single entity for sales tax collection and providing a single sales tax return form for retailers to use in reporting tax payments, greatly simplifying the process.

Despite those simplifications, many e-commerce companies are opposed to the bill. eBay, for instance, sent an email to customers yesterday asking them to oppose the act.

“Whether you’re a consumer who loves the incredible selection and value that small businesses provide online, or a small-business seller who relies on the Internet for your livelihood, this legislation potentially affects you,” eBay’s letter said. “For consumers, it means more money out of your pocket when you shop online from your favorite seller or small business shop owner. For small business sellers, it means you would be required to collect sales taxes nationwide from the more than 9,600 tax jurisdictions across the U.S.”

Naturally, bricks-and-mortar retailers line up on the other side of the issue.

“You have businesses all around America on Main Streets and shopping malls collecting sales tax on the things that they sell, competing with Internet retailers who do not,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said, as reported by Reuters. Durbin is a co-sponsor of the bill.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has an excellent explainer on the Marketplace Fairness act.

Photo credit: kenteegardin/SeniorLiving.org via photopin cc

Image monetization startup Stipple has debuted a killer new social commerce tool that lets sellers make sales through picture sharing on networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Appropriately called Stipple Shopping, the new tool makes e-commerce a lot simpler. Posting a photo on Facebook or Twitter can immediately give users the ability to buy the product from that same screen. So when a shoe company debuts a sexy new pair of kicks, it can share a photo of it on Twitter and consumers looking at that post can make an in-line purchase there.

Not only can you buy a product in-stream, you can also explore multiple versions of the same product from that screen. You can see different colors, other relevant/related products, and videos as well.

Stipple CEO Rey Flemings believes this will help make transactions on the web more frictionless and give publishers a new way to push products more effectively.

“As the growth of online, brand-related images continues to explode at a predicted rate of 10% annually, so do the audiences consuming these images, allowing us to help brands advertise in images that contain their products,” Flemings said in a statement. “And we’re seeing engagement rates averaging 7.5%, dramatically higher than other forms of advertising.”

Today’s news comes only a week after Twitter shut down in-stream payments service Ribbon. Twitter and Ribbon have not revealed exactly why the service was shut down only 90 minutes after launching. But one would hope Stipple has done its homework to make sure Twitter doesn’t shut down buying products in-stream.

San Francisco-based Stipple has raised $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sands Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Floodgate, Relevance Capital, Justin Timberlake, and others.

Check out the video below for more on Stipple Shopping.

ChannelAdvisor provides software-as-a-service solutions to help retailers and manufacturers integrate, manage, and optimize their merchandise sales across hundreds of online channels, including Amazon, Google, eBay, Bing, Groupon, and Facebook. Customers can build customized solutions or use the “managed services” for help implementing campaigns.

“The e-commerce market has grown significantly over the last several years, as consumers have increasingly shifted their retail purchases from traditional brick and mortar stores to online stores and marketplaces,” the company said in the filing. “This trend has created many opportunities for retailers and manufacturers, but at the same time has resulted in additional complexity and challenges. Retailers and manufacturers seeking new avenues to expand their online sales must manage product data and transactions across hundreds of highly fragmented online channels where data attributes vary, requirements change frequently, and the pace of innovation is rapid and increasing.

The filing also cited a Forrester report that found online consumer spending is expected to increase to $1.1 trillion in 2016, which will grow the need for tools that help merchants navigate the “complex and fragmented” market. ChannelAdvisor’s software supports the full spectrum of e-commerce vendors, including marketplaces, paid search providers, companion shoppers, flex feeds, and social shopping companies. Services like inventory management, reporting and analytics, and content optimization help vendors get the most of their online sales.

According to the S-1, ChannelAdvisor had over 1,900 customers worldwide as of December 31, 2012, and in 2012 alone its customers processed over $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value through the platform.

ChannelAdvisor was founded in 2001 and has raised $75 million to date. Investors include eBay, Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, Southern Capital Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates. ChannelAdvisor is based in North Carolina.

ChannelAdvisor S-1

Photo Credit: ChannelAdvisor Facebook 

Honey is a Chrome extension that surfs the web for discounts when you are checking out of an online store. Today, the startup announced it has closed a seed round of an undisclosed six-figure amount from angel investors.

In the days of yore, budget-conscious shoppers would go through newspapers to clip coupons before taking a trip to the store. People are buying online now more than ever; however, Hudson said this shift is both “a blessing and a curse” for consumers, as “the convenience of online shopping is accompanied by the paradox of choice.” The Internet has hundreds of thousands of merchants selling an endless array of products. Prices fluctuate, and there is always the lingering fear, once you hit checkout, that you could have held out for a better deal.

Honey’s mission is to eliminate this fear by helping you find the best deal on a product you have selected.

“Honey was created to solve a problem that we have all been dealing with for the past 10-15 years,” said founder Ryan Hudson in an email. “Honey is unique because of its design philosophy — the product was designed to add value when users need it most. We loved the idea of creating a shopping companion that helped you only when you needed it, which is very different than most plug-ins, which are often ever-present.”

Most e-checkouts ask users if they have a promo code. More often than not, the answer is no. Honey places a “Find Savings” button on the checkout page of hundreds of online shops. Clicking on the button will automatically find and apply coupons, without redirecting you away from the original site. It is coupon clipping for the Internet era.

Hudson earned his MBA from MIT and formerly worked as a venture capitalist. His cofounder, George Ruan, has worked for five startups, three which had exits. They “accidentally” launched Honey around Thanksgiving, after someone they hired to help bug test the technology posted it on Reddit. Honey now has over 200,000 users and works with over 100 sites, including big brands like Amazon.com, BestBuy, Macy’s, Lowes, Target, and Walgreens.

Honey is by no means the only coupon clipping tool out there. Google recently announced Zavers, a digital coupon based on your phone number,  as well as Coupons at Checkout, which works in multiple browsers and 100,000 online retailers, and there are others like RetailMeNot, Coupon Tweet, Coupon Gravy, and KT Coupon that offer some variation on the same principal. With so much saturation, Honey has a battle ahead of it to catch customers, retail partners, and investors.

Honey is based in Pasadena, California and has 10 employees, including an engineering team with experience working at Apple and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coupons are almost as cool as rockets. Almost.

Photo Credit: Honey

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Glasses.com has introduced a cool new way to try on sunglasses without having actually having to try on sunglasses. The company has created a 3D virtual try-on technology that captures your face in 3D graphics and then overlays glasses on your virtual face. It’s realistic enough that you can try on a huge collection of sunglasses without ever stepping into a store.

The technology is an application of augmented reality, but with a realistic style that makes the shopping experience much easier, as you can quickly check out hundreds of sunglasses (or regular glasses) and find a match for your face. The Glasses.com 3D Fit app will even recommend glasses to you, and you can share the images with your friends so they can help you decide. The app will be available on the iPad in May, with iPhone soon after.

“We make a 3D model of your face,” said Jonathan Coon (pictured with his own virtual image), CEO of Glasses.com parent company 1-800 Contacts, in an interview with VentureBeat. “You can search for sunglasses and get lots of suggestions. Our goal is to make it more fun. We borrowed more from Hollywood special effects than augmented reality.”

Coon showed the app to me yesterday and scanned my face. The app captures your face by taking a series of photos. I had to stay still and turn my head slowly from side to side so that the iPad’s camera could capture my face from many angles. It then stitches the images together into a 3D rendering in a relatively short time. Once the company’s servers render your face, you can play around with it, swiping sideways to see the side of your face. Then you can try on different sunglasses, four at a time (mine is scanned above).

Coon had the idea a while ago, but the technology is finally good enough to execute on it. The app capitalizes on OpenGL ES, the graphics standard that allows an app to use a device’s 3D graphics processors to render an image, rather than the central processing unit. The graphics processor is much faster and makes for fluid motion graphics in the app. You can swipe sideways endlessly and the app will keep showing you new glasses and how they would look on you. You can even see the shadows the glasses would cast on your face. If you move the glasses, the shadows move too.

“We try to get much closer to realism than your typical augmented reality app,” Coon said.

The app is an innovation that comes from the small Glasses.com division (with a few dozen employees) of 1-800 Contacts, which health insurer WellPoint acquired last year for an estimated $900 million.1-800 Contacts has 750 employees. Android and web apps will come later this year.

That’s not bad for a business that started in Coon’s dorm room at Brigham Young University in 1992. He had the foresight to acquire the contacts.com web domain in 1997, and he picked up glasses.com in 1999. Coon, as an aside, is the brother of Jeremy Coon, the executive producer and editor of the hit 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite. Looks like Jonathan Coon has some dynamite of his own with this app.

You can move the glasses up or down your nose and see what they look like from the side. You can also view them up close by zooming in. The speed of the 3D is never an issue. That comes from a few years of iteration in development.

“It never felt like the tech was there before, until we saw a demo of [Microsoft's 3D image synthesis app] Photosynth in 2007. That technology can be used to create 3D panoramic photos and recreate images such as the cathedral of Notre Dame in 3D.

“I thought you could do that with glasses one day,” Coon said.

The iPad captures the images and then sends them over a Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G connection to a data center. There, the images are processed and a 3D rendering is sent back to the iPad. That process takes maybe 30 seconds or so. Once you scan your face, it’s easy to try on new glasses.

Coon showed off the technology at an exhibit at the recent TED conference in Long Beach, Calif. Nobody asked about the 3D technology, which was very difficult to create. The most common question he got from people trying the app was, “Which of these final pairs is good for me?”

So my question is, based on the photos at the top, which pair is good for my face?

Acumen Brands has raised a whopping $83 million to support growth of its portfolio of e-commerce companies. The company operates branded online storefronts for businesses like CountryOutfitter, Tough Weld Workwear, and Scrub Shopper. It takes advantage of knowledge of SEO, social media, marketing, business strategy, and data analytics to help retailers of cowboy boots, construction work apparel, and medical scrubs effectively sell their wares online.

The company was founded in Fayetteville, Ark. in 2009 by doctor-lawyer duo who gave up their careers to pursue entrepreneurship. When it first started out, Acumen had four employees and a 2,000-square foot warehouse. It quickly expanded and today operates out of a 50,000-square foot warehouse, employing 150 people, and using 30 Kiva Systems robots.

CEO John James told Arkansas Business that this new financing will support the move to a 200,000-square foot facility and the addition of 20 to 30 new robots. Investment firm General Atlantic led this round, following two previous $5 million rounds from local investors Dillards, Noro-Moseley Partners, BLH Venture Partners, and the Arkansas Risk Capital Matching Fund.

Acumen Brands has not yet responded to request for comment. Read the SEC filing. 

Photo Credit: Acumen Brands

Pickwick & Weller is an e-commerce startup that designs, manufactures, and sells “the perfect T-shirt.” Today, the company launched its Spring 2013 line and revealed a high-profile list of investors, including Forerunner Ventures, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Baseline Ventures, and Mousse Partners.

Ashton Kutcher is one of the founders of Pickwick & Weller, along with serial entrepreneurs Ryan Donahue — a founding member of the PayPal design and user research — and Matt Rowe [above]. The trio has spent many years in the tech and fashion communities, and they wanted to create a brand that appealed to people looking for casual clothing for the workplace.

“The workplace has changed,” Donahue said in an email. “It’s become more creative and more casual, and the T-shirt is the work uniform of choice for entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, and artists.”

Pickwick & Weller works with a range of high quality materials such as supima, modal cotton, cashmere, silk and linen. Donahue said with T-shirts, the fit is just as important as the fabric, and since the company has adopted an entirely online business model, it can offer high-end products at a lower price point.

Vertically integrated, online-only clothing companies are taking center stage of the fashion world. Not only are consumers shopping online more frequently, but entrepreneurs, fashion designers, and brands are eschewing traditional retail channels for those that provide greater flexibility. Pair that with the fact that in the tech world “the T-shirt is king,” and the interest towards Made-in-America products, and you have a startup sitting at the center of multiple cultural, fashion, and Internet trends.

Pickwick & Weller’s design headquarters is in Los Angeles, with the business headquarters in San Francisco. There are currently nine employees. In addition to the insutuiotnal investors listed above, Ashton Kutcher, Warby Parker founder Dave Gilboa, and Max and Nellie Levchin also participated in this round.

Photo credit: Pickwick & Weller

Professional women still want to rock the trends — but don’t want to add to an already overflowing closet.

E-commerce entrepreneurs like Mary Wu (pictured) are experimenting with a new model, a “Netflix for clothing.” Rather than buying a new dress, why not rent one and return it when it’s no longer in style?

For $25 a month, Wu will send you a monthly “box” filled with clothing from stores like Zara and H&M. Boxes can be ordered on the website CoutureSQD by theme, such as professional or date night. Each box contains three outfits, which you can keep for as long as you want. 

“I follow trends and see what’s popular,” said Wu, who developed the website on her own. “A lot of women are like me in that they wear 20 percent of their clothing, 80 percent of the time.”

Wu’s customers will get the satisfaction of wearing a new outfit, but won’t slide into debt. The website just launched, so only about 100 women have signed up, but Wu is confident about her chances with the twenty and thirtysomething professional set.

Websites like RentTheRunway.com are already well-established among young professionals who can’t afford to buy a designer dress, but are willing to fork over about $100 for a one-off rental. CoutureSQD works differently as it’s a subscription service, and specializes in lower-end trendy apparel for everyday use.

This subscription model is tried and tested when it comes to other areas of fashion; Rocksbox focuses on high-end jewelry, Shoedazzle focuses on designer shoes, and TieTry lets people rent fancy ties by mail.

Similarly to these sites, when you want to return the items, CoutureSQD will send a prepaid shipping label by email. The company covers the cost of dry-cleaning, so you won’t need to run the clothes through the wash. If you happen to like an item of clothing and want to keep it, Wu will sell it to you at a discounted price.

The site is still in the early-stages of development, but Wu has identified a strong pain-point. In the coming months, she hopes to recruit additional team-members, and procure a round of angel funding.

“The whole purpose of this is to help women mix and match, and try fashion at a lower-risk,” said Wu.

Would you use a subscription clothing service like this one? Let us know in the comment section below. 

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Getting an edge on home-delivery is a continuous battle amongst e-commerce giants and brick-and-mortar retailers alike. Amazon, eBay, and Target, not to mention a slew of startups, are experimenting with different models that quickly and cheaply get their products into the hands of purchasers. Even Google today announced its own same-day shopping service called Shopping Express. 

Wal-Mart began testing a same-day delivery service during the holiday season in order to keep up with competitors and consumer demand. According to a report in Reuters, Wal-Mart’s latest plan would pay in-store customers to deliver online orders to people in their community. People who are shopping at an actual Wal-Mart can sign up to drop off packages for people who live nearby, and in exchange receive a discount on their shipping bill.

The plan is based on the idea of the “sharing economy,” which connects people with available goods, services, skills, space, time etc… to those who need them.  Startups like TaskRabbit, Exec, Zaarly, and Postmates have quickly made this model a staple of internet commerce, and large retailers are taking notice.

Wal-Mart has struggled to make in-roads with the online market. It traditionally uses Fedex for online purchases and recently began trying out a series of different delivery models to see what works. Earlier this week, the corporation announced plans to test the use of lockers to store online purchases until shoppers pick them up, similar to Amazon. It also recently experimented with deploying its own delivery trucks with Walmart To Go.

Leveraging a local workforce could provide more immediate service than channels like Fedex, UPS, or the postal service, at a lower cost than building up an internal fleet of delivery vans and drivers. However, working with regular people instead of employees raises a whole different slew of issues of accountability, reliability, and scale. The idea is currently in the “brain-storming” stage, according to Wal-Mart exec Jeff McAllister in the Reuters article. However, it will be available as a test in some stores, and perhaps only available for metro markets and higher-price items.

Photo Credit: NNECAPA/Flickr

The load times of the top 2000 online retailers is down 22 percent in the past year, according to a study released today by web app delivery and security provider Radware.

And the more money you make, the slower you are.

“This is a massive drop in performance,” Radware VP Joshua Bixby said in a statement. “If this slowdown rate goes unchecked, we will see median load times of 9 seconds or more, which is simply unacceptable for online shoppers.”

The median or most common load time for retailers’ home pages was 7.25 seconds, which is up from 5.94 seconds in the previous year’s study. Those slow speed can cost retailers up to 9 percent of their traffic and as much as 13 percent of sales, says Radware. And the top 100 e-tailers’s web pages loaded in an even slower 8.23 seconds.

Why?

Radware says that pages webpages are getting bigger. In December 2012, the average page was over a megabyte — 1163 kB — while in December 2010, the average page was only 665 kB. That’s 75 percent bigger, and at this rate, web pages will be over two megabytes by the end of 2014. Internet access speeds aren’t keepin gup.

In addition, web pages are getting more complex, with dynamic elements, multiple scripts, and resources pulled from multiple servers in multiple locations from multiple vendors. Radware says that the average top retailer site contains seven third-party scripts for services such as analytics, social media, and ad engines. Each of them can slow down a website.

Three simple things can improve performance drastically, says Radware: using a content deliver network (CDN) to deliver pages from geographically-distributed servers, enabling keep-alives to reduce handshake time between browsers and servers, and compressing text to send data quicker. But 75 percent of the top 2000 retailers do not use a CDN, 13 percent don’t use keep-alives, and 22 percent don’t compress webpage resources.

Interestingly, despite getting a bad rep for its big pages, Amazon is a top retailer that is reversing the trend of slower pages. Amazon.com loads in 3.26 seconds, faster than last year and in the top ten retailers for speed.

Top 10 retailers by site speed:

1. CVS.com (1.02 seconds)
2. Polo.com (1.9 seconds)
3. eCrater.com (1.95 seconds)
4. Abebooks.com (2.05 seconds)
5. BHPhotoVideo.com (3.03 seconds)
6. JCrew.com (3.15 seconds)
7. Amazon.com (3.26 seconds)
8. ShopAtHome.com (3.74 seconds)
9. Etsy.com (3.88 seconds)
10. Gamefly.com (3.94 seconds)

And more data, in visual form:

photo credit: ….Tim via photopin cc

Indochino is an online menswear store that makes shopping for stylish clothing as painless as possible. Men pick from a selection of suits, shirts, outerwear and accessories to choose their style, customize their choices with details like monograms and linings, and go through a quick step-by-step guide to create their measurement profile. The clothes are then made and delivered within 35 days of ordering.

“Most men need all the help they can get when shopping for their own wardrobe,” said Tom Stemberg, Managing General Partner of Highland Consumer Fund, in a statement. “By providing higher quality custom menswear at a lower cost, Indochino has revolutionized the direct-to-consumer business and become a global presence in custom menswear.”

Highland led this round and Stemberg will join the company’s board. Madrona Venture Group and Acton Capital Partners also participated in this round. Vertically-integrated e-commerce startups are taking off, as well as fashion startups geared towards men who appreciate the convenience of online shopping. Last April, online mens clothing retailer Bonobos raised $16.4 million and other startups like Frank & Oak and Trunk Club have garnered attention for making good style easy and accessible to the average Joe. By cutting out the middlemen, companies like these can offer higher quality goods at a lower cost and prove a greater layer of personalization.

This financing will be used to investment in marketing and product development. Indochina is also opening up a pop up ‘Traveling Tailor’ store in Boston, where men can be measured and styled in person. Indochino is headquartered in Vancouver, BC. It was founded in 2007 and has raised $17.25 million to date.

Photo Credit: Indochino

Zaarly started out as a “mobile Craigslist” that focused on the buyer. Its members posted goods or services they were looking for with a certain time frame and price, and people on the other side of the marketplace would fulfill the tasks. In September, Zaarly released “Storefronts” where sellers can display what they do and offer it for sale. This update shifted focus to its best sellers. At the time, Zaarly said the “want engine” that allowed people to request anything would still be available.

However, a report in TechCrunch this morning tipped us off that Zaarly’s core product — the request-anything-buyer-centric marketplace — is no longer available. The storefronts are now the whole shebang.

A post on Zaarly’s blog said that the ‘The Seller Project’ began a year ago. The team realized that there was a select group of active sellers who were building a group of loyal fans and decided to create a platform to help them market their services. “Request Anything” would  be phased out, and Zaarly Storefronts would be the main product.

Zaarly started out in 2011 as a competitor to CraigsList and TaskRabbit. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers led a $14 million round, and current HP CEO Meg Whitman joined the board of directors. Since then, the company added integration with social commerce site The Fancy and released a “Zaarly Anywhere” button that connected products or services on the web directly to Zaarly’s marketplace. The company seemed to be searching for a model that stuck.

Now, Zaarly more closely resembles Etsy or Shopify as a place where people can showcase their unique crafts and skills.

Unfortunately, Zaarly is now a little late to the game for this type of marketplace. Maybe the pivot will prove to be a smart move and help many small business owners boost their marketing and sales. Maybe. But as a consumer, perusing the marketplace, I see a lot of things that look cool, but that I would never buy. I am all for juice cleanses, apartment cleaning, and I bet my boyfriend would appreciate a week of homemade “Bro Meals” delivered to our door, but I don’t see anything that encourages me to buy or that I can’t find anywhere else. That said, next time I am desperate for a fully assembled terrarium with a bonus animal, I know where to go.

Photo Credit: Screenshot

Like its American forebear, Jumia sells a wide range of goods at low cost with easy delivery and returns. The retailer is currently active in Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco and sells clothing, electronics, furniture, books, baby products, cosmetics, home appliances, and even booze. Rather than paying online, shoppers can pay at their doorstep.

Jumia launched about a year ago out of Rocket Internet and quickly grew its customer base. Many of Africa’s e-commerce companies focus their operations in South Africa, where the economy and access to technology is the strongest. However, e-commerce is still a tricky issue in Africa, as payment technology and Internet connectivity are not strong and many consumers don’t have smartphones, computers, or extra money to spend shopping online.

Although Internet and mobile penetration still has a long way to go in Africa, the rates are climbing, particularly in the mobile sector. A growing middle class means more opportunities for business are arising.

“There is very much a demand from the growing middle class to have quality products both in beauty and in fashion that is currently not met in the Nigerian market or in many other African countries,” said former Rocket Internet CEO Stiegeler in an interview with VentureVillage. “That means that either they buy things abroad or have other people ship the product in, which is obviously very time-consuming, expensive and tedious.

Rocket Internet is a Berlin-based incubator program that has been a fervent supporter of African startups. It has a commercial presence in Egypt, Morocco, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Furthermore, Rocket Internet CEO Leonard Stiegeler was actually one of the founders of Jumia. He previously founded online fashion retail store Sabunta, which then merged with another company to form Jumia.

Summit Partners also believes in the potential of the African e-commerce market. The firm led this round through its German holding company to fuel Jumia’s growth. In October, Summit Partners also led a $26 million round in Zando, the ‘South African Zappos.’

Rocket Internet and Summit Partners aren’t the only ones excited about Africa’s potential. Google has teamed up with African accelerator 88mph, and other incubator and accelerator programs are cropping up as well. Again, most of the efforts and activity are focused on South Africa, but if Jumia’s growth signals anything, it is that the rest of the continent wants a piece of the action as well.

Photo credit: Axel Rouvin/ Flickr

Julep is a fast-growing cosmetics brand that sells nail polishes, bath and skin products, and makeup. It does all its business online. In addition to regular sales, Julep also offers a subscription service along the lines of Birchbox, where “Mavens” receive a box filled with a curated selection of Julep goodies.

In the past year and a half, Julep has launched 52 new beauty products and 186 nail colors. The startup attributes this remarkably fast rate of production to a lean e-commerce business model, which does not involve physical stores and relies on social media channels for marketing. Julep factors fan feedback into its product decisions and envisions beauty as a “two-way conversation” between the brand and the women engaging with it. The low overhead costs mean more resources can be devoted to iterating quickly and rolling out new products every month.

Julep is part of a larger trend of vertically-integrated e-commerce companies like Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Indochino, Beachmint, Shoedazzle, and Everlane (to name a few) that cut out the supply chain and get their products directly to consumers at significantly lower prices.

Julep was founded by former Starbucks executive Jane Park. Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andressen Horowitz, said in a statement that Park and her team “have leveraged the Internet to build Julep into a compelling brand at a pace previously unheard of in beauty.”

In 2012, Julep launched nationwide on QVC and Sephora. This second round of financing will fuel development into new categories of cosmetics. Maveron Venture Partners, which led Julep’s first round, also contributed to this financing.

“As direct TV proved to be a launching pad for enduring beauty brands decades ago, we believe new social media channels will be the catalyst for launching the next great multi-channel beauty companies,” said Maveron board member Jason Stoffer in a statement. “Julep is a pioneer in using Facebook, Pinterest, and the social web to deeply engage its community of beauty lovers around color and fashion-forward beauty products.”

Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, Precedent Investments, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, Western Technology Investments, and Version One Ventures also participated in this funding round. Julep is based in Seattle, Wash.

Photo Credit: Screenshot

Windeln.de is a German online retailer for baby products, and it has tucked away $19.6 million (€15 million). In 2012, the company developed faster than a healthy toddler, and this financing will support continued growth.

Known as the Diapers.com of the German-speaking world, Windeln’s inventory includes includes more than 20,000 products from 300 companies, including diapers, baby good, toiletries, and pacifiers. Parents can easily place orders for their baby needs online and have them delivered to their door. Prices are lower than in many physical retailers, and parents of newborns appreciate the convenience of shopping from home.

Windeln had a successful year in 2012. According to a statement, it grew by more than 300 percent and now has a revenue run rate of $65. 34 million (€ 50 million). Furthermore, almost 70 percent of orders originate from existing customers. These are enticing numbers for investors. As such, existing investor DN Capital and new investor MCI led this funding round, with participation from Acton Capital Partners and 360 Capital. Each of these firms have European offices and will support Windeln’s expansion into new European markets.

The idea for Windeln was born when founder Constantine Urban and his wife, Victoria, were vacationing with their children on the North Sea in 2009. As young parents, they wished they didn’t have to lug large boxes of diapers to-and-fro — or panic when they ran out of the one kind of baby food their child liked. Urban founded Windeln in Munich in 2010.

Babies aside, Germany is one of the hottest markets for startups in Europe. Venture capital firms and incubator programs are setting up shop in Berlin, and the thriving cultural landscape presents a desirable environment for young, hungry entrepreneurs.

Babies may be expensive, but like startups, there is enjoyment in watching them grow up. Read the press release. 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Euclid has raised $17.3 million in its second round of funding to bring data analytics to physical retailers. Euclid gives brick-and-mortar businesses the ability to better understand their customers by monitoring their behavior while in the store. Merchants install a small sensor and connect it to the Internet. The sensor measures the behavior of all shoppers carrying a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone and then turns this data into understandable, actionable form.

The company refers to its approach as “Google Analytics for the real world” and seeks to give offline businesses the same advantages as online business when it comes to understanding consumer behavior. Store owners can capture information about which window displays receive the most attention, what times of day see the most foot traffic, and so forth.

Benchmark Capital led this round, with participation from NEA, Harrison Metal, and Novel TMT Ventures. Euclid officially launched in 2011 and announced $5.8 million in funding. Its founders previously started Urchin, which was acquired by Google and set the foundation for Google Analytics.

Now, the company has reportedly installed its sensors in over 30 apparel chains, quick-serve restaurants, shopping malls, department stores, and other brick-and-mortar locations. This national traction was fueled by the release of Euclid Zero earlier this year, which requires no dedicated sensors, but rather enables IT managers to turn on the Euclid feature in their Wi-Fi management console. All together, Euclid detects an average of three billion events per day.

Euclid is based in Palo Alto, California.

Photo Credit: D’oh Boy (Mark Holloway/Flickr

The now 10-year-old and extremely well-capitalized startup is one of the largest online retailers of home goods and furnishings, with a selection of more than five million products. Daily Fair will feature seven new sales a day, seven days a week, which will each last for 72 hours — and offer up to 70 percent off.

Flash sale sites took off in 2012, offering an exciting new e-commerce business model that attracted millions of consumers, millions of dollars in revenue, and millions of dollars in venture capital. Zulily and One King’s Lane raised $85 million and $50 million, respectively, from big name investors, and Rue La La, Gilt, and Fab.com have large, active, and spending user bases.

Wayfair’s new feature is not just an attempt to hop on the trend wagon — it’s  the latest step in Wayfair’s quest to be definite online destination for home goods. During an interview with VentureBeat, founder and CEO Niraj Shah said that e-commerce only makes up 6 percent to 10 percent of total retail sales for home goods — and this number is going up.

“Most people don’t buy home goods until they are 30 years old and have a house or are married with kids.” Shah said. “The group that is at this stage in their life now is the first to grow up with the internet, so their willingness to buy online is high compared to other folks and it goes up every year. E-commerce keeps on getting better and better and people feel more comfortable making purchases online. We want people to start by looking here, because we have everything. There is a pretty big opening here and we are going to run with it.”

Convenience is also a key factor here. Many people (present company included) don’t want to dedicate their nights or weekends to furniture shopping. With online ordering, consumers can peruse multiple options, make comparisons, and have purchases delivered to their door without schlepping from place to place.

The flash sale feature is intended to add an additional layer of convenience, as well as attract a different category of user. Wayfair’s massive selection can be overwhelming, and flash sales are appealing to people who don’t want to hunt for a specific item.

Wayfair claims to be the first mass retailer to integrate daily flash sales into its business model. The promotion will go out at noon each day, and will feature products linked by theme or category, as well as a selection curated by bloggers, designers, and other “influencers from the home community.”

Shah founded Wayfair back in 2002, long before e-commerce was as mainstream as it is now. Back then, it was an amalgamation of small, item-specific sites that in 2011 became an integrated entity known as Wayfair. To support this transition, the company took institutional money for the first time and has raised more than $200 million to support its growth. Wayfair broke $600 million in sales in 2012 and sees over 12 million visitors a month. This success is largely due to focusing on customer needs and the overall user experience.

“People want their homes to be unique and feel personal,” he said. “They want a very big selection so they can find the exact thing they want at a good price, and ‘best-sellers’ aren’t really a priority. You can’t inventory everything in a warehouse and turn the inventory. We amassed the selection all-in-one place by working with 5,000 different manufacturers, and then build the supply chain and transportation delivery network to deliver it to the customer.”

Competitors include traditional retailers like Target, Sears, and Pottery Barn as well as e-commerce giant Amazon. The “home goods” sector includes everything from extremely expensive designer couches to cheap lighting, and Wayfair attempts to bring it all together under one digital roof. The main challenge left? Building any furniture that comes unassembled. But at least there are other services for that.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mick Jagger can’t get no satisfaction, but apparently a lot of 14-year-old boys can. So too, fortunately, can Apple, Amazon, QVC, and NewEgg clients.

While Amazon took top honors in customer experience firm ForeSee’s latest mobile shopping satisfaction index and Apple came in second, the big surprise was Victoria’s Secret. The hot lingerie retailer took a top-five position for the first time. (See the full list of the top 25, below.)

So is lingerie shopping on-the-go the new new thing, I asked ForeSee chief executive Larry Freed?

“Either that or there’s a lot of 14-year-old boys on mobile devices,” he joked. ”Actually, though, we see a lot of people in-store taking pictures and sending them to a friend for an opinion, or checking size and color availability.”

Amazon also leads in online retail satisfaction, and perennially does well. Apple put in a strong showing after sliding in last quarter’s online retail numbers, and home shopping giant QVC, electronics retailer NewEgg, and — of course — Victoria’s Secret rounded out the top five.

The secret of Amazon’s success, it turns out, is fairly simple.

“Both in the web and mobile they do a great job of being focused on the customer,” Freed says. “They offer great selection with competitive — not the best, but competitive — prices.”

There’s a lesson in that for other m-commerce retailers. While overall customer satisfaction with mobile stores is getting better, retailers who want to improve their stores need to focus on four key areas: price, merchandise, functionality, and content. Price needs to be reasonable, sure, but scope of merchandise available is also an opportunity to delight customers, as too many retailers present too few of their product selection on their mobile sites. Functionality and features of your mobile store also matter (more is better, as long as usability is maintained), and accessibility to content about the products is also critically important.

[Editor's Note: Mobile commerce, and how to be more successful at it, is one of the themes of our upcoming Mobile Summit in Sausalio. Find out more here.]

And your mobile site needs to work with and be integrated into all your other channels.

“A lot of times customers are starting on the web,” Freed says. “But sometimes it’s the store. It’s worth remembering that today’s consumer is not only multi-channel but also multi-device … moving from a work computer to a home PC to a mobile phone to a tablet … and consumers expect that to be seamless.”

That’s a tough job for retailers, particularly for non-logged-in users. But as fast as mobile commerce is growing — and it does have significant amounts of growing to do — the expectations are rising even quicker, Freed says.

And what about every bricks-and-mortar retail’s favorite bugaboo, showrooming?

“It’s a glass half full, glass half empty syndrome,” says Freed. “Consumers are using a phone to get more information more often while in a store. But the challenge is to embrace showrooming … to offer a great experience in-store and a great experience on mobile so that they can negate the risk and maybe even turn showrooming into a positive.”

The top mobile retailers by customer experience, according to ForeSee:

photo credit: Ed Yourdon via photopin cc

Club W uses an algorithm to provide customers with personalized wine recommendations based on their tastes and purchasing histories, said chief financial officer and cofounder Geoff McFarlane.

Chief marketing officer Ari Radetsky said that Club W subscribers must order at least three wine bottles per month, spending a minimum of $39 (not including shipping) at each interval. He said Club W sells bottles at two different price points: $13 and $19 for each individual bottle.

“We want people to learn, experience, and discover wine in a non-pretentious way,” said McFarlane.

Club W’s most significant competitors are traditional wine clubs and Wine.com. Radetsky is critical of Wine.com, citing its impersonal user experience and “bloated wine jargon that doesn’t help people connect with wine.”

Cofounder and chief business development officer Mark Lynn believes Club W’s business model is superior to the competition because it showcases small-batch curators, who produce the artisan-crafted wine favored by a growing share of the consumer market. A recently authored Forrester Research Report estimates that the domestic wine industry generated $35.9 billion in 2012.

Club W was founded by chief executive Xander Oxman, Lynn, and Mcfarlane in Denver in February. The company later relocated to Los Angeles and shifted its business development operations to startup accelerator Amplify LA’s Venice Beach campus, said Radetsky. He also said that Club W plans to spend the bulk of its funding on customer acquisition and increasing brand awareness. McFarlane emphasized that Club W’s marketing efforts will focus on the 25- to 35-year-old demographic.

Crosscut Ventures led Club W’s Series A, with participation from Guild Capital, L.A.-based Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, Brenner International Group, Amplify L.A., and angel investor Csaba Konkoly.

Club W has raised $3.6 million in all and has sold over 100,000 bottles of wine, said Lynn. The company employs seven people full-time and is located in Manhattan Beach.

Image of McFarlane, Oxman, and Lynn courtesy Club W.

Don’t have time to obsess over the latest fashion trends? Launching today, a new service called Ajent is bringing curated style options to busy professionals.

Most e-commerce sites focus on breadth and offer a massive database of fashion items, typically imported by the community or a developer scraping the web. Polyvore, for instance, is updated with over two million new items each month. 

But San Francisco-based Ajent feeds its users just one “look” per day. Sign up for free, and receive a daily email with trendy style suggestions, home decor options, and more.

Today’s look is “Emerald”; users can peruse a shortlist of affordable deep green shirts, a kimono, pants and shoes, and even plan a trip to the Emerald Isle.

Ajent’s founder Meghan Higney (pictured above) hit on the idea for the site when she was bedridden for several months after breaking her back. The former private equity professional said she felt “overwhelmed” by the clutter on the Web and yearned to have a personal style hunter to source the best deals, delivered straight to her inbox.

So Higney quit her day job to develop the site and daily newsletter. She tested the beta on 200 users — men and women — and brought on a team of five staff members, including a front-end designer and several fashion editors. Each day, Ajent’s human editors pore through magazines, street style blogs, arts and culture, and more for inspiration. 

Ajent is a bootstrapped effort, and the next step is to hire engineers to build an algorithm (inspired by Netflix or Pandora) to offer personalized style recommendations. This will differentiate it from sites like Stylefeed that help users curate fashion by searching for deals from their favorite designers.

“The really interesting piece will be when Ajent brings you items on a day-to-day basis that you have told us specifically to look for,” said Higney over coffee. Ajent will also be aware of users’ size, budget, and style preferences.

To make money, the team is also considering rolling out a concierge-style service. If you’re looking for a leather skirt for spring, an Ajent style hunter will source the best deal and style from the Web and offer suggestions for items that will complement the look. It’s a similar business model to Zirtual, a virtual assistant service that is growing quickly and recently raised funds from Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh, among others.

In the future, Ajent will also benefit from building its own buying and selling platform, so users won’t be redirected to an external site if they choose to make a purchase.

In a recent interview, Forerunner Ventures‘ founder and managing partner said the key for the next wave of e-commerce sites is to “focus on augmenting the traditional shopping experience.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

That fancy new app the marketing department wants so you can sell more paperweights may not be your best investment. In fact, unless you’re lucky or really, really good, the app might just end up being the digital equivalent of a paperweight itself.

A new report from Research 2 Guidance says that in 2012, most online stores made less than 5 percent of their revenue via a mobile app. Fewer than a fifth made a significant percentage of their revenue from mobile — only 19 percent of companies realized more than a quarter of their revenue via their mobile shopping apps.

However, the market has some optimism that things are improving.

Of the more than 600 mobile-commerce companies surveyed, Research 2 Guidance says that almost a third of companies expect to see more than a quarter of their revenue from mobile within the next five years. And 15 percent of them plan to bring in a full half of their revenue via mobile apps.

Some very successful mobile apps generate significant revenue,  Research 2 Guidance said, but that’s not the story for most.

“Successful [mobile] commerce apps achieved download numbers of more than 2 million, but the long tale with apps that make only a few thousands downloads is long,” a company representative told me via email.

So, what is working?

Not shockingly, stores that sell virtual goods are doing well. A slice of the market makes most — if not all — of its revenue via mobile apps (see the graph above with the two short bars near the right side). Companies like Kabam or Rovio, which almost exclusively make mobile apps — generally games — and sell upgrades and virtual goods inside them, are notable exceptions to the rule.

photo credit: Stephen Poff via photopin cc

ShoeDazzle is reverting back to what it knows best: helping women find trendy, discounted shoes.

Just three months after the L.A.-based e-commerce company reinstated its cofounder Brian Lee as CEO, it has announced some big changes. Among these is a new “VIP” membership service that enables users to receive special discounts on shoes. This harks back to the site’s early days when women paid $40 each month to receive a pair of shoes.

Over coffee, Lee said the plan is to bring back “innovation and creativity” to the site. Recently departed CEO Bill Strauss had planned to turn ShoeDazzle into a Zappos clone and bolster its marketplace with apparel, lingerie, and swimwear. Strauss also did away with the membership model to enable the site to appeal to a broader audience.

“Bill Strauss helped us build a foundation,” said Lee over coffee. “But I didn’t feel that the site was headed in the right direction.” Shoes account for 80 percent of the overall business — although the site will continue to sell handbags and accessories.

The new VIP membership service costs $9.95 a month. Unless users make a purchase, the monthly fee accumulates in an account known as a “shoe fund.” Women that sign up to the program receive special discounts, advice from personal stylists through a concierge service, and extended return policies.

Lee hopes to increase return visits to the site and gather data about consumer purchases. ShoeDazzle uses an algorithm, not dissimilar to Netflix, to target its members with shoes they’ll love. The curatorial piece is central to the company’s vision — Lee explained that customer service reps receive “fashion training” so customers can call and ask for a pair of shoes that will match their red dress.

Lee said the program is showing early signs of success. ShoeDazzle is adding 500 women a day to the VIP program from the wait list. Likewise, results from the beta have been encouraging (about 12,000 women are currently signed up). The VIP program will be launching to the public in mid-February.

The site is already known by over 45 percent of women aged 18 to 32, but to increase awareness, ShoeDazzle surveyed its members for their ideal celebrity spokesperson. The winner? Rachel Zoe, who was recently named the company’s chief stylist. Lee is no stranger to the benefits of celebrity endorsements — he cofounded the Honest Company with actress Jessica Alba.

ChowNow gives restaurants streamlined mobile-and-online-ordering templates and marketing consulting services for $89 per month, pricing independent app developers ($15,000 per contract) and online deal services like Groupon out of the market. ChowNow’s template allows restaurants to customize their own online marketing strategies and customer incentives.

The growth of e-commerce, projected to rise 62 percent by 2016, according to a Forrester Research analyst report, puts ChowNow in a favorable market position.

“We help [restaurants] build a snowball, and we push it down the hill, and we give them two months of help, and there’s so much repeat business that the snowball builds itself,” ChowNow founder and chief executive officer Christopher Webb told VentureBeat.

Webb identified ChowNow’s primary competitors as grubHub and Seamless, but said restaurants using these services are giving up 15 percent of their revenue on every order.

Webb said he and co-founder Eric Jaffe launched ChowNow in May of 2012 and have already acquired hundreds of clients, including franchises like CiCi’s Pizza and Ground Round as well as dozens of smaller establishments. Additionally, ChowNow has recently expanded its service into ski resorts Mammoth Mountain and Homewood Mountain Resort, said Webb.

ChowNow will use its Series A funding to support the launch of new products and scale its operations around the country, according to a company press release. The same document says that these additions include a catering service and an online-ordering platform made exclusively for pizza restaurants.

GRP Partners led this first institutional round for ChowNow, with participation from Daher Capital, Double M Capital, Karlin Ventures, and Velos Partners.

To date, ChowNow has raised over $4 million, including funding from accelerator Launchpad LA, which graduated the company last May. ChowNow is headquartered in Santa Monica and employs 16 people all over the country, said Webb.

Image courtesy ChowNow.