These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in August 2020, Razor Group is a consumer holding company that partners with ecommerce brands to acquire their Amazon FBA businesses. It then scales these brands by using growth capital and in-house ecommerce expertise. The company focuses on specific product categories and aims to enhance value in the long-term while maintaining customer satisfaction. 

Based out of Berlin, Germany, Razor Group also has operations in Austin, Hangzhou, London and New Delhi. To date, it has raised a total of $559.8M in funding over 8 rounds. In November 2021, the company was valued at $1B+.

About Razor Group: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

Razor Group acquires businesses it deems worthy from 3rd party sellers on Amazon and scales them up. The targeted brands are typically generating between $1M and $15M in annual revenues. A 3-step process is followed for acquiring the business. 

Once a potential brand has been identified, the first step involves Razor having a call with the seller to learn more about their business to assess whether it would be a good match to bring onboard with the ‘Razor Ecosystem’. The process moves forward if both parties are willing.

Next, Razor deep-dives into the business. It quickly evaluates the important aspects of the brand (at no cost) by looking into the key financial data, P&L and operations of the business. This enables Razor to have a fair evaluation of the business. A deal structure is agreed upon and a Letter of Intent is signed where both parties agree on a purchase price and move further in the process. 

The final step is closing and integration. A Due Diligence process takes place where the target business’s commercial, financial and legal history is checked by Razor’s Due Diligence team, financial advisors and lawyers. Razor transfers the payment within the next week. The total process spans roughly 6 weeks – from the valuation of the Amazon FBA business to getting all the documents cleared and finally transferring the seller’s money to their bank account.

How It Works

Razor identifies FBA businesses that have the potential to grow and then acquires them from 3rd party sellers. The technology they use performs massive due diligence and rapidly evaluates the businesses’ performance to shortlist those for acquisition. Some of the criteria used for evaluation includes checking product quality, customer ratings, product complexity and growth potential. They bypass any reliance on brokers for these acquisitions due to the efficiency of their own algorithms which leads to better pricing.

In such a quick process, the group aims to reach these lucrative businesses faster so they are able to build strong relationships with the sellers without any time pressure. After screening, shortlisting and acquiring new brands according to the criteria, Razor proceeds to streamline and scale operations for these brands through its proprietary tech stack. This includes technologies such as DoubleClick Conversion, Google Analytics, Google Global Site Tag and more. It also diversifies sales channels, turning the brand into a multichannel business and eventually reducing its dependency on Amazon.

Razor’s data processing then provides insights to grow these businesses and figure out viable options to sell them on platforms other than Amazon. 

Business Model and Pricing

Razor Group’s business model is based on integrating select merchants into a wider operations framework run by the company. This is called the ‘FBA Rollup’ model, whereby businesses that have been built on the platform provided by Amazon are consolidated. 

In terms of pricing, Razor’s valuations are flexible to accommodate a seller’s preference. For example, some sellers prefer upfront payment, others prefer participating in the growth journey through profit sharing or to stay onboard post-acquisition. The baseline deal structure that Razor offers has two components:

• A base purchase price, paid to sellers immediately upon acquisition 

• A profit sharing scheme, an opportunity for sellers to continue to share profits after acquisition. Generally, 20%–50% of additional profits reaped in the first 2 years of acquisition are shared with the seller.

As explained by founder Jonas Diezun, Razor’s valuations generally range from a multiple of 2.5x–6x on net profits. This includes both base purchase price as well as profit share.

Traction

In May 2021, founder Tushar Ahluwalia stated that the group was on track to cross $120M in sales from the 30 brands it had acquired. The company also predicted crossing $480M in sales in the following 12-15 months. In November 2021, Razor Group shared that it is on track to having 80+ merchants onboard by the end of 2021 and is aiming to pass $1B in sales in 2022. The company had analyzed roughly 1.5M Amazon merchants and shortlisted about 80K of them so far. 

Moreover, the company was overall profitable in 2021, and earned $400M in revenues for the year. According to CEO Tushar Aliawala, 70% of Razor’s revenues were reaped from the US, and 12% of revenues were generated from platforms other than Amazon. The company aims to increase that share to 20% in the next 3 quarters. 

Founder(s)

Tushar Ahluwalia: Co-founder and CEO. He spent the last decade building market-leading consumer tech companies like StalkBuyLove, a D2C fast-fashion private label company.

Jonas Diezun: Co-founder and CCO. Recently he founded two direct-to-consumer businesses, Franksmile and Radice. Prior to his founder's experience Jonas was CMO at Konux.

Christoph Felix Gamon: Co-founder and VP Acquisitions. Prior to Razor he was Venture Director at Rocket Internet for several years and TMT investment banker at UBS.

Oliver Dlugosch: Co-founder and VP Operations. Prior to Razor he worked at McKinsey & Company as a consultant for several years while completing his PhD in Economic Sciences. 

Shrestha Chowdhury: Co-founder and VP Tech/Analytics. Prior to Razor, she was the Chief Product Officer at StalkBuyLove, where she led the Technology and Digital Marketing functions. 

History and Evolution

Note: Currencies have been converted from Euro to Dollar based on a currency converter.

In an article by founder Jonas Diezun, he explains that amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the e-commerce sector was provided a catalyst to grow. In particular the online presence of the retail sector grew significantly, and the pandemic brought forth new online shopping behaviors. Sellers on Amazon were (and still are) bringing amazing businesses through the platform. These factors were taken into account by the founders as they established Razor Group.

The Razor Group was founded in 2020 and has been doing quite well in its short operating history. Based out of Berlin, Razor quickly began partnering with e-commerce merchants to acquire and scale their brands. Its goal since inception was to focus on specific product categories and growing long-term value. 

According to Techcrunch, by May 2021 the company grew to 107 employees across 4 offices. It also acquired a mixture of debt and equity funding. The equity was meant to be invested in the startup itself and the debt was to be used for acquisitions. Considering $375M of the total $400M was debt funding, it highlighted Razor Group’s ambitious goals for acquisitions. 

In November 2021, Razor Group closed a $125M Series B funding round. According to the founders, the company plans on using these funds to continue to expand its business reach and diversify its portfolio. Today, it has a diversified portfolio of FBA brands across Europe and the US operating in multiple categories.

Despite the existence of several other companies following the same business model as Razor Group, it believes that its particular point of differentiation is the technology it uses in the process of identifying and buying brands, and then growing them. Through its specific technology, the focus also lies in the quick response to the market, which includes snapping up businesses that have potential faster than their competitors. For example, the ‘M&A 2.0’ Platform that Razor uses evaluates about 1 million companies each week as they perform on platforms like Amazon. 

Additional Learnings

• The May 2021 funding round of $400M had the involvement of FJ Labs and Global Founders Capital, the VC firm co-founded by the Samwer Brothers who are well-known for their e-commerce incubator Rocket Internet. Two of Razor’s co-founders, Ahluwalia and Gamon, are Rocket Internet alums, which may or may not have played a role in securing the support of the VC firm.

• Two of Razor’s co-founders, Ahluwalia and Chowdhury, had also previously worked on an e-commerce business in India called Stalkbuylove. However, the business ran out of cash and shut down.

• Startups that have been founded on an opposite business model are also cropping up. For example, an e-commerce company called Jungle Scout provides tools to these 3rd party sellers that helps them stay independent and grow. They also help them become more valuable for acquisitions by firms such as Razor Group. 

• By November 2021, 12% of Razor’s revenue comes from platforms other than Amazon and the company aims to reach 20%.

Market Snapshot

• In 2019 alone, 2.5 million merchants sold goods worth R €200B globally via Amazon. The US is the largest country on Amazon’s marketplace and Germany is the second largest.

• By May 2021, it was estimated that there were about 5 million 3rd party sellers on Amazon, whereby more than 1 million sellers had joined the platform in 2020 alone.

• Of the startups following this model, Razor’s numbers indicate it is one of the biggest startups in Europe as of November 2021 and more than 70% of its revenue comes from the US.

Suggested Next Reads 

• Selling your Amazon Business with Razor (Medium, April ‘21)

• Berlin’s Razor Group raises $400M to buy and scale Amazon Marketplace merchants (TechCrunch, May ‘21)

• Berlin’s Razor Group raises $125M at a $1B+ valuation for a platform to buy and scale third-party Amazon merchants (TechCrunch, November ‘21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2014, Bolt offers online checkout technology to retailers. It streamlines online shopping and payment methods, which are otherwise fragmented, into a seamless experience. This enables people to have more options when shopping online. Bolt now has millions of shoppers and top brands within its network.

Bolt strives to help merchants of all sizes sell more, grow faster and be more competitive against giants like Amazon. It takes on the checkout-related challenges of a retailer, and also provides solutions such as superior fraud detection services.

Bolt is headquartered in San Francisco, California with offices in Salt Lake City, Toronto, and New York City. It has managed to raise a total of $963.1M via 11 funding rounds. Bolt was last valued at $11B and has experienced 2 more funding rounds since.

About Bolt: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

Customers often abandon their shopping carts because the lengthy checkout process requires them to log in and add their information when they order from a company for the first time. As a solution, Bolt’s software lets shoppers buy across different online sellers’ sites without being prompted to log in every time they want to make a purchase. This is called the one-click checkout and it solves an essential problem for e-commerce firms.

Bolt’s core offerings include the Bolt Network, which connects retailers with shoppers. Other offerings include the One-Click Checkout. Here, shoppers save their basic information during their first purchase within the network, so they never have to enter personal or payment data againing the core offering. Bolt Commerce is another service where valuable first-party data and unique shopper insights can be leveraged to turn one-time shoppers into life-long customers. Bolt Payments makes collecting payments very easy. Lastly, Fraud Protection protects retailers from many things including fraudulent chargebacks and false positives. 

Bolt CheckoutOS is the engine that powers identity accounts, one-click checkout, fraud prevention and payments for the Bolt Network. It enables retailers to create a tailored, localized buying experience for their customers and maintain a connection to them. This system results in many positive changes such as decreased number of abandoned carts, higher checkout conversions, and a way to build lifetime relationships with customers worldwide.

How It Works

Joining the Bolt Network means a retailer can offer shoppers a one-click checkout with no passwords, forms or payment details even if they have not visited the site before.  Other issues that Bolt takes care of include the complicated technological challenges involved in the checkout, fraud detection and digital wallets.

From the first moment retailers go live with Bolt, they can offer their shoppers a one-click checkout experience with a 63% higher conversion rate than guest checkout. More than 90% of Bolt retailers have benefitted from this network effect by serving customers that have already made purchases with Bolt at another retailer. The rate of cross-retailer activity is growing rapidly, up 25x since the beginning of the year.

For each user, Bolt creates a persistent shopper identity across all retailers in the Bolt Network. Shoppers receive a unified checkout experience, and retailers can treat the millions of in-network shoppers like returning customers. 

Bolt solves 3 challenges for a retailer:

1. Integration: Retailers can outsource the checkout stack to Bolt along with all of the related integrations, and therefore merchants and platforms save considerable resources.

2. Conversion: Retailers can leverage Bolt’s highly optimized frontend, which consistently outperforms the retailers’ existing checkout.

3. Fraud: Bolt mitigates risk for retailers by using behavioral data collected throughout the checkout experience to inform our fraud decisioning. This is done by collecting 4x the real-time data signals, understanding the shopper to maximize order approval and conversion, and personalizing outdated checkout forms that require unnecessary fields to validate a shopper.        

Business Model and Pricing

Bolt uses a hybrid payments-and-software model. The company makes money off of payments, along with charging for the other services like fraud protection that it offers. It charges these services on a SaaS basis.  

When customers shop with retailers that have partnered with Bolt, their addresses and credit card information are saved. This allows them to place subsequent orders with Bolt-powered retailers without having to put in their personal information again. 

Bolt then charges retailers when customers, who have already saved their information with Bolt, make new purchases. To be specific, Bolt makes money by charging merchants a 2% fee on purchases made through it.

Traction

Bolt has overall achieved tremendous growth in the past, especially in 2020. That year, Bolt processed over $1B in retail transactions and experienced a 10x increase in the size of its Bolt One Click shopper network. It was adding more than 250,000 shoppers every month. Bolt also experienced a 3.5x higher GMV since 2019 (which had an implied $286M GMV). The company had predicted a 3x higher GMV in 2021, translating to roughly $3B. 

Furthermore, according to a 2020 report, Bolt had achieved the following milestones:

• 4.5 million Bolt Account shopper network

• 2.2 million shoppers added just in the past 6 months

• 50 million more shoppers lined up through the reach of all ABG brands

As of July 2021, Bolt had gathered 6M registered users and was expecting 50M people to be using its one-click checkout service by 2022. More than 300 merchants now use the service and Bolt caters to online retailers that make $10M to more than $100M in annual sales. Founder Ryan Breslow wrote on his blog,” Bolt expects 11% of US shoppers to be a part of its network by the end of 2021. By the end of 2022, it expects one-third of all US shoppers to be on its platform, and by the end of 2024, that share will grow to two-thirds. By 2025, Bolt is projected to interact with eight out of every ten shoppers in the United States.”  

Another source reveals that by October 2021, Bolt had partnered with hundreds of retailers and gathered 10M registered users.

Founder(s)

Ryan Breslow: Co-founder and CEO at Bolt. Previously, Ryan has co-founded the Beam currency and Eco, a crypto digital wallet startup. He also started the original Stanford Bitcoin Group and is a former Co-Founder and CEO at Sites by Hand.

Eric Feldman: Co-founder at Bolt. Feldman has also co-founded Eco with Breslow. He was a creator of various startups from 2007 to 2011, with a focus in education, enterprise software and microlending. 

History and Evolution

Founder Ryan had a lot of experience with online checkout systems prior to the founding of Bolt. In high school, he started to build ecommerce websites for businesses of all sizes. These were great learning experiences for him as this is where he began discovering the shortcomings of online commerce space which would eventually lead him to establishing Bolt.

In 2014, Bolt was founded with a vision to set a new standard for ecommerce. It started with a small team of 10 people that worked tirelessly for 2 years to create the first version of Bolt’s checkout solution. Bolt then officially launched its first merchant with just the payment step in mid-2016. 

From 2016 to 2020, the company’s product and team grew exponentially. $215M were raised in funding and the team grew by over 200 members. About 250+ retailers had come onboard. 

In July 2021, Bolt led a Series D funding round which resulted in a valuation of $4B. According to some sources, this valuation was nearly 5 times the valuation Bolt had in December 2020. The company intended to use the funds to accelerate its product innovation, which would include tools that enable shoppers to checkout on any page. Bolt also planned on expanding to more customers nationally and internationally.

In January 2022, Bolt reached a valuation of $11B after a $355M funding round. According to a blog post by Founder Ryan, Bolt’s general hyper-growth can be attributed to a simple way it differentiates itself from its competitors’ offerings such as Amazon and Shopify’s one-click checkout. While these companies have an extensive reach, it is limited to their platforms. Bolt on the other hand offers flexibility and control to other retailers that don't have access to good insights on their customers. This solves a key problem for both customers and retailers. Customers prefer having a single identity through which they can shop anywhere, while retailers get to offer their customers consistent shopping experiences.   

Additional Learnings

• Bolt’s initial business model revolved around digital currency in online checkouts, but after around 12 months of experimenting, Ryan and Eric decided to shift focus to the ecommerce model.

• Bolt claims its checkout page is up to 10 times faster than that of its competitors due to a special preprocessing technique. Here, the customers are not required to enter a billing address and it adopts a post-checkout (as opposed to pre-checkout) registration model. 

• To reduce fraud, Bolt’s machine learning algorithms analyze over 200 variables on each transaction, and a vigilant team reviews every declined transaction. Any flagged customers can provide additional information to get their orders approved.

• After its October 2021 funding round, Bolt reached a $4B valuation which was 18 times its valuation in 18 months.

Market Snapshot

• Ecommerce firms in the market commonly face one similar problem - customers abandoning their shopping carts due to lengthy checkout procedures.

• A December 2020 article highlights how the checkout space is a hotspot for growth in the market right now. A lot of cash is being injected into the market just to solve the customer pain point of lengthy checkout processes, resulting in several companies like Bolt raising funding rounds one after another. For example, competitor Fast had raised $20M while Checkout.com, an English competitor, raised $150M in 2020.

• By July 2021, financial technology startups had raised over $23B in funding rounds in the US alone. Bolt’s close competitor Fast had raised $100M in January 2021.

Next Suggested Reads

• Bolt raises $68 million to simplify ecommerce (Venture Beat, July ‘19)

• Bolt adds $75M to its Series C, as the battle to rule online checkout continues (TechCrunch, December ‘20)

• Bolt announces $393 million in new funding to fuel commerce’s first federated checkout network (Bolt, October ‘21)

• Online checkout firm Bolt valued at $11 bln after funding round - source (Reuters, January ‘22)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2010, Washington DC-headquartered Optoro is a reverse logistics technology company. It works with retailers and manufacturers to process, manage and then resell their returned and excess inventory. Its software platform enables customers to get great deals, reduces environmental waste, and maximizes recovery value. 

Optoro has been named one of the fastest-growing companies in the US. It has raised $252.8M from investors such as Revolution, UPS, Generation Investment Management, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  With a client list of top national brands like IKEA, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, Staples, American Eagle, Groupon, Bed Bath & Beyond,  a growing team of 200+ employees, and a recent $25M Venture Fund in 2021, Optoro is gradually making its way to the top. 

On the Web: Website, Linkedin

Business Overview & Products

Optoro’s main offering is a SaaS called OptiTurn. It is used in retailers’ warehouses to process, sort, and resell inventory that is in excess or has been returned by clients. The software keeps track of inventory from the warehouse till it reaches customers. Products can be marked as new, open box, refurbished, or used as per their condition. This information is analyzed by OptiTurn along with other data points to make sure that these items are diverted to the channel that will get retailers most of their money back. 

The products are listed on online marketplaces under the brand name BLINQ. Products that are expected to net a higher recovery in bulk selling are resold on BULQ.com under the brand name of BULQ.  

How It Works

Returns Management Solution streamlines return processing and create operational efficiencies across the supply chain. Starting at receiving, the technology collects meaningful data that allows for smart returns routing and channel decisions. It also includes intuitive desktop tools designed for adaptability and seamless operations. Retailers can automate and accelerate vendor returns with  SmartRTV & Vendor Management to remove RTV cost and complexity. In addition, the holistic platform enables business agility with data-driven decisions, real-time insights, and unit-level visibility across the returns lifecycle.

Recommerce Solution maximizes recovery on returns, drives higher profits, and improves sustainability. It sells returned inventory through retailers’ own primary and secondary channels or on Optoro's proprietary B2B marketplace, BULQ, which is a one-stop-shop for retailers to utilize excess and returned inventory by putting them in the hands of retailers. BULQ appeals to resellers who are willing to pay a premium and move inventory at a fast pace, expanding their reach to more than 20 secondary marketplaces. Recommerce also ensures circularity by making sure that the leftover inventory ends up with happy customers or at charities instead of landfills.   

Returns Experience Solution helps improve customer experience and loyalty during the returns cycle. For starters, to make the process seamless for first-time customers, they offer a Returns Portal for self-service returns initiation which also includes digital experiences like one-click exchanges. Moreover, to decrease refunds and drive repurchases, in case of a return, Instant Credit delivers customers the right product even before they return the wrong one. When it comes to delivery, Express Returns offers convenient drop-offs by not just providing convenience and speed but also offering label-free and box-free returns at numerous store locations throughout the country.  

Optoro has access to a huge inventory of returned/unsold products because it handles reverse logistics. Each return that Optoro processes are entered into its ‘re-commerce’ system, which evaluates the item's condition and assesses value based on current market prices. Optoro then assigns a condition – Brand New, Like New/Open Box, Factory Refurbished, Used-Very Good – that is indicated on the item for resale so customers know exactly what they are getting. The item is then sent back to the retailer, manufacturer, or Optoro’s retail arm BLINQ to "recover the most value." where new or like-new items are sold at deep discounts. 

Business Model & Pricing

Optoro has a B2B business model that helps both offline and online retailers sell returned or excess inventory more easily.  Optoro has several channels for collecting revenue. For starters, customers who use the software are liable to pay a monthly licensing fee. Moreover, when the company sells goods on Blinq and Bulq, it takes between 15-50% of the amount it recovers for its clients, which ranges from $20 cents to $70 cents on the retailers’ part. 

Traction

Optoro’s revenue was last estimated by Forbes in 2017 at more than $50M. With a growing staff of 220 in its Washington, DC headquarters, and its contract deal with more than 100 workers in its rented Tennessee warehouse, Optoro’s overhead is substantial. In addition, the company spends its investment capital on growth.

In 2020, 13,400 resellers bought and resold inventory from BULQ.com due to their newfound partnership with eBay. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the company processed more than $100M of goods a month through its platform with the number growing at a quick pace. From its partnership with Staples and eBay, Optoro was able to divert 3.2M lbs from landfills. The company also sent over $3M of goods to charities in need by partnering up with IKEA. The technology used helped retail clients keep 96% of returned and excess inventory out of landfills. It also prevented 4.68M lbs carbon emissions by reducing transportation and increasing efficiency in the reverse supply chain. Optoro has access to more than $500M customers and their app has over 100k downloads.

Founder(s)

Tobin Moore (LinkedIn): CEO and Co-Founder at Optoro. Tobin, a graduate of Brown University previously co-founded eSpot, Optoro’s predecessor. He was also recognized as Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and was featured in Washington Business Journal’s 40 under 40 list. 

Adam Vitarello (LinkedIn): President and Co-Founder at Optoro. Adam, a Brown University graduate has previously worked as CTO and CEO at eSpot, Optoro’s predecessor. He also worked at Fojol Brother, a traveling culinary carnival. 

History & Evolution

The origin of Optoro dates back to 2004 when Tobin Moore, a student of Brown University watched his father struggle to sell an item on eBay. At the time, eBay was the main e-commerce destination available online, but still tedious and difficult to use. As a first-time user, with no buyer feedback, Tobin’s father could not find any buyers, and neither could he decide on a fair price per item. That is when it hit Tobin: there was an opportunity available to disrupt the used goods retail market. 

So in 2004, Tobin started eSpot, Optoro's precursor out of his Brown University dorm room. The initial idea was to help sellers list used goods on eBay. eSpot would price items, take photos and write up a listing, in addition to managing the eBay auction for its clients. To help with operations, Tobin brought on board his childhood friend, Justin Lesher, who operated out of his dorm room at Penn.

After graduating, Tobin and Justin ran the business out of an attic above the garage and went without paychecks for two years. However, soon they opened a 1200 square foot eBay drop-off store in Georgetown and roped in another Brown graduate, Adam Vitarello to help run the business.

They borrowed $350,000 on 37 zero-interest credit cards for funding. The revenue model, with eBay as their vehicle, was based upon a 30% commission on sales up to $500 and 20 percent on sales above that. They got positive local press coverage and scored some big sales such as a 1965 Mustang and a $100,000 Rolex. Outlets like The Washington Post profiled eSpot on multiple occasions, allowing the three entrepreneurs to network and meet others in the city’s business scene. Soon, neighborhood retailers started using eSpot to sell returns and excess inventory. Catering to small retailers made them realize that big-box retailers must have the same problems and that there was a huge market gap to be filled. 

In 2008, they opened an office and warehouse in Lanham, Maryland, where they processed goods from retailers. But that same year, the financial crisis hit, and banks hiked the rates on eSpot's zero-interest cards to 30%. Facing bankruptcy, Tobin worked up an elevator pitch and started trying to raise money. He struck out at more than 100 investor meetings in the DC area before he landed his first angel, Nigel Morris, the co-founder of Capital One Financial Services, who pledged $1M through his investment firm, QED, in Virginia.

To up their game, the trio hired three developers, who spent nearly two years coming up with a scanner and software system, and in 2010 they launched the new business as Optoro. That same year they launched BLINQ, a retailer specializing in surplus and returned goods such as electronics, furniture, small appliances, apparel, and more. Using reverse logistics, BLINQ’s main goal was to help divert closeout, overstock, and returned products from landfills to customers looking for bargains, and at the same time, reduce waste and carbon emissions.

After launching Optoro, Tobin and Adam were joined by CTO Jessica Szmajda as Justin left the company. In 2012, the company's proprietary, cloud-based software platform OptiTurn was launched. It uses proprietary pricing algorithms and predictive analytics to drive the highest financial recovery possible for returned and excess inventory. The same year, after incessantly pitching Optoro at RLA’s annual conference in Las Vegas, Tobin signed his first big retail client, BJ’S Wholesale Club, which sells discount goods to members through its network of warehouses in the US. The contract helped the company raise more funds.

In 2013, the company opened a corporate office in the vibrant Chinatown neighborhood of Washington DC, while maintaining a thriving operations headquarters just outside the city in Maryland.

In 2014, the company partnered with Groupon to handle excess inventory for Groupon Goods, the Chicago-based retailer’s popular product deals website. Optoro kicked off the partnership by rolling out its proprietary software on-site at Groupon’s fulfillment center in Hebron, Kentucky.

In 2015, Optoro launched BULQ, its B2B wholesale marketplace, which offers resellers and recyclers an easy and reliable way to source discount inventory and parts in bulk directly from retailers. These include overstock, returned, refurbished, and excess inventory. The company also started a dedicated sustainability team. It measures the transportation and waste impacts of the returns industry and the effects that Optoro's solution has on retailers' carbon footprints.

In 2016, Optoro formed a strategic alliance with UPS. The companies’ joint reverse logistics solutions combined the operational and logistics expertise of UPS with Optoro’s software platform. It helped maximize recovery value and reduced environmental waste. That same year the company moved to a larger office space located in the Metro Center neighborhood of Washington holding around 160 people.

In 2019, Optoro partnered with IKEA to reduce waste from returns. Optoro’s technology was implemented in 10 IKEA distribution centers, 50 retail stores, and the Customer Support Center in the U.S.

In 2020, eBay and Optoro announced an exclusive partnership. The two companies leveraged their respective proprietary technologies to make sourcing and reselling on eBay faster and more seamless for sellers, thus accelerating the pace of resale. It also partnered with Staples – the office supply giant that would accept unboxed returns from other retailers that would be processed by Optoro. The program, called Express Returns, would provide safe contactless return options so customers at all the 1,000 locations can spend more time at home with their families in the holiday season. The company also announced a strategic partnership with Returnly, the leader in digital return experiences and post-purchase payments. Optoro would integrate Returnly’s customer-facing eCommerce returns technology into its broader returns platform to offer the first end-to-end returns solution for retailers and brands.

In 2021, Optoro became the winner of a Gold Stevie Award in the Business-to-Business category for its BULQ on eBay partnership integration. It also shut down its direct-to-consumer eCommerce website BLINQ. To date, it has helped retailers achieve: 600,000 backlogs cleared within 2 weeks; 150% increase in net recovery; 91% of returns resold; and 55% reduction in returns exceptions.

From archive.org 

Market Snapshot

• According to Statista, the IT services market in the USA is estimated to increase to $409.60B in 2022 at a CAGR of $7.31%. 

• The market volume is expected to grow to $543.10B by 2026 and the largest segment of the market is IT outsourcing. 

Suggested Next Reads

• Optoro's Sustainable Reverse Logistics Platform (Supply Chain 247, April ‘15)

• Optoro Appoints Fumbi Chima and Julia Taxin to Board (City Biz List, April ‘21)

• Optoro Creates Environmental Impact Model (SJF Ventures)

• Forbes says Optoro is one of the 'Next Billion-Dollar Startups' (Technically, Sep ‘17)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace connecting independent small retailers and brands around the world. Founded in 2017, the company enables small businesses to compete on a more level playing field with the likes of Walmart and Amazon. It benefits and connects both retailers and wholesalers to the vast pool of up-and-coming products across the world.

The company has successfully raised $1.1 Billion in its first 4 years of operations and has offices in Amsterdam, Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, São Paulo, Toronto and Waterloo.

About Faire: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

Faire offers an online wholesale marketplace that connects small business owners and independent brands to buy and sell wholesale online. For retailers looking to purchase wholesale products on the platform, the marketplace offers convenient financial terms and logistics such as its famed Net 60 terms. These terms, while previously being offered by other businesses, were mostly only available to large retail chains once.

For its brands, Faire’s platform offers powerful sales, marketing, and analytics tools to the sellers. These tools can excessively simplify the operations and business for these sellers.

How It Works

Through its online marketplace, Faire connects retailers seeking brands and wholesalers seeking to sell those products. Once wholesalers join the platform and display their products, retailers can buy from them based on their requirements. 

After a retailer purchases merchandise from Faire, they can sell it online or in a brick-and-mortar shop. However, retailers must refrain from selling these purchased products on giant platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Poshmark, because it goes against Faire’s basic policy. This is due to its ultimate goal to support small businesses, which is why this prohibition is in place. 

Technology plays a big part in Faire’s success. The platform leverages machine learning to automatically match local retailers with the most relevant makers for their stores. It has also developed in-house algorithms which aim to improve product recommendations, ranking, search, logistics, and more.

Business Model and Pricing

Faire’s business model depends on joining its online marketplace for free, according to an article in Capitalism.com. Interested wholesalers first have to fill out an online application before they can begin selling on the site. Then Faire makes money through commissions. Wholesalers only pay a commission on new business they obtain from the site. Hence Faire takes this commission whenever a retailer places an order on the site. Commission percentages vary from 25% for first-time orders down to 15% on reorders.

The retailers benefit from Faire’s model through Net 60 payment terms, which let retailers test products completely risk-free. Retailers can buy merchandise they like, stock it on shelves, and then gauge customer response. After 60 days, they can return any unsold merchandise without any obligations. They can even get free returns on any merchandise they send back.

Traction

Faire had a successful response from the get-go. The Capitalism article discusses how within 3 months of the launch of Faire’s net 60 payment terms, it went from doing $100,000 to $1M per month in gross merchandise value by the end of 2017. However, the journey was not entirely easy. In 2018, retailers returned a staggering amount of merchandise and many of them who failed to return the merchandise did not pay up. A rigorous analysis revealed that the issues were stemming from the Net 60 payment terms, and so the terms were updated. Credit limits were imposed and a ranking system was created for wholesalers and products. Within 6 months, return rates dropped by 75%.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, the retailer landscape drastically changed. Trade shows, which were a norm, had to shut down and their virtual counterparts could not keep up. Brick and mortar shops began closing overnight and retailers and wholesalers desperately sought a solution, which Faire presented. However, the company did impressive business in 2020. It tripled its revenues and sold over $75M products to small businesses that year. It must be noted that Faire took clever measures to cater to the issues some of its retailers were struggling with. The pandemic initially forced many of the company’s retailers to the brink of shutting down their businesses, sending their inventory orders plunging by more than 60%. In response, Faire offered extensions on its payment terms for purchased inventory and waived the fees it charges brands to get paid for orders right away.

Today, Faire boasts the following statistics (as listed on its website). There are:

• 300,000 retailers buying on Faire

• 15,000 cities with Faire retailers

• 40,000 brands selling on Faire

• 2 million connections introduced on Faire

Founder(s)

Max Rhodes: Co-founder & CEO at Faire. Before Faire, Rhodes was the first product manager for many initiatives at Square, including Square Capital and Square Cash. He came up with the idea for Faire while introducing the Blunt Umbrella in the US.

Daniele Perito: Co-Founder and CDO at Faire. Prior to starting Faire, Daniele led Risk and Security for Square Cash, where he designed and implemented the anti-abuse and anti-fraud systems that have made Cash possible. 

Jeffrey Kolovson: Co-Founder and COO at Faire. Prior to Faire, he was at Square where led Caviar, Square’s food delivery service.

 Marcelo Cortes: Co-founder & CTO at Faire. Prior to the founding of Faire, Marcelo worked as a Staff Software Engineer at Square.

History and Evolution

Before Faire came into existence, the wholesale model was extremely outdated in the sense that small retailers could only discover and purchase new merchandise in-person, through emails, or via telephone. Hence, they were limited in the range of wholesalers they could reach and struggled to keep up and were often subjected to unfair pricing.

In 2017, a group of colleagues working together at a mobile payment platform called Square had an idea. Perito, Kolovson, Cortes and Rhodes all worked in different departments at Square but had a common revelation for the antiquated wholesale model in place. With their different backgrounds, each could bring a variety of skills to the table and so with this idea in hand, Faire was founded in 2017. It was built on the understanding that the old wholesale model needed a revolutionary change. Their mission was to connect small retailers, including mom-and-pop shops, with the right products, so the solution they came up with was an entirely online wholesale marketplace. 

In the words of co-founder Rhodes, “We just happened to land on the right idea from day one. The result was that we started growing pretty fast, pretty quickly.” The idea worked out as small business owners also responded well to the online hassle-free model. It ended up benefiting both wholesalers and retailers, as wholesalers could now be connected to up-and-coming brands across the world, while retailers could bid competitively for the latest products without even having to leave their shops. This model would also enable them to compete against giant retailers. 

Additional Learnings

• The June 2021 funding round coincided with Faire’s decision to expand across continental Europe. Its European market outpaced the US by 230% after only 30 days of launching.

• Faire has reported 300% YoY growth after expanding to the largest markets across Europe.

• Retail clients who use the payment processing system Square can link their Square account with Faire to get data on how products are selling, and which items are likely to sell out.

• Faire uses advanced AI Technology to power its platform which consists of predictive software that features Faire’s own in-house AI-powered image recognition software.

• Faire was originally named Indigo Fair.

Market Snapshot

• According to the National Retail Federation, the US has close to 3 million small retailers with fewer than 10 employees, accounting for 91% of the retail businesses in this country.

• There are millions of thriving small businesses in North America and Europe alone, and it is estimated they collectively represent a $2T market.

• Wholesale trade in the US grew 4% from 2020 and has reached a $8.5T market size by mid-2021.

Suggested Next Reads

• About Faire (Faire, 2021)

• From $0 to $7B in 4 Years - Here’s How the Founders Did It (Capitalism.com, August ‘21)

• Faire Nearly Triples its Valuation to $7B With $260M Series F Funding Round Led by Sequoia (Business Wire, June ‘21)

• Faire Wholesale Reviews and Makes Tips (Wholesale in a Box, February ‘21)

• Review of Faire – The Wholesale Marketplace Platform (Lucky Break Consulting, ‘19)

Competitive Intelligence & Analysis

Click through to dive into the competitive intelligence on the company, including website and mobile analytics, review information on the product and organization, and more.

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Snapshot

Cider is an e-commerce fashion brand based out of Hong Kong. Founded in 2020, the company is on its way to becoming a global brand with an innovative approach to building community, reducing inventory waste, and shipping anywhere in the world. 

Cider’s retail model is focused around reducing waste. The brand has a pre-order option available where it only produces the specific styles it knows that people want. It also seeks to educate its customers on the possibility of a zero-inventory future, without any compromise on affordability. 

Currently, it has offices in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Los Angeles, with branches located in New York, London, Seoul and Brisbane. It has managed to raise a total of $140M in its short operating history, with a valuation over $1B.

About Cider: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

As a global D2C e-commerce platform, Cider focuses on overseas markets. Its products include low-priced yet fashionable clothing for women, with a focus on a zero-inventory future. It has a diverse range of product offerings which cater to both fashion and affordability. The company also has a significant social media presence, which allows customers to give their feedback in the form of reviews. However, one downside of the policy of reducing waste is that products may sometimes run out of stock as they are produced in a limited amount to avoid wastage of inventory.

How It Works

In order to maintain its zero-inventory efforts, Cider works with AI forecasting. This helps the brand make smart production choices on the number of clothes produced. This significantly helps with cutting down any waste resulting from extra inventory. 

The website offers creative ways to shop for a customer. A customer can choose from one of Cider’s list of “moods” that cater to specific microtrends. The site also has a new-in section to find must-haves the old-fashioned way.

The company offers two options for shipping: standard and express. Standard shipping delivers the product to the customer in 8-15 days, while it takes only 5-8 days under express shipping. In total, delivery duration may be upto 15-20 days. Its return policy allows customers to return a product within 14 days of purchase. Refunds are made after 7 days of return. The online mode of payment accounts for Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, American Express, Discover, Diners Club and PayPal.

Business Model and Pricing

The company charges $5.99 for standard shipping and $8.99 for express shipping. The company offers free shipping on orders over $49 in selected countries. It also has a return policy, where domestic returns are free of cost. It caters to worldwide shipping. 

Traction

In its short operating history, Cider has accumulated one billion impressions on social media around the world, covering consumers from more than 100 countries. Moreover, it has more than 2 million followers from around the world. These include the 2 million followers from Instagram and the 650,000 followers on Tiktok. 

Its latest financing round of $130M led Cider to a valuation of over $1B, making it one of the fastest growing unicorns in the world.

Founder(s)

Michael Chen Wang: Co-founder and CEO at Cider. Michael is an entrepreneur. He was previously a TMT investor at IDG Capital mainly focused on early-stage investments.

Fenco Lin: Co-founder at Cider. A former buyer for Bloomingdale's, Fenco Lin is now trying to build the next Shein through her work at Cider. She worked as the lead for 2017 “Redefine” summer camp and co-led its 2016 conference.

Yu Wu: Co-founder at Cider. Prior to Cider, Yu was a product manager at Dolls Kill. She has also served on the product and operations team at Uber. 

History and Evolution

Cider was founded in 2020, and earned its initial popularity through TikTok. Cider kicked off with its target population on the platform too, as the website indicates. A customer can shop by mood on Cider’s website, which seems to go well with the functionality of TikTok. Unlike its close competitor Shein, however, Cider has been able to avoid the extreme negative connotations of a fast-fashion brand. It had its fair share of scandals, but was able to avoid bigger scandals by simply presenting itself as a smaller business. 

The latest round of financing of $130M would be used by the company for brand building, R&D of systems and overseas business expansion. According to the company, it will also upgrade traditional manufacturing methods with artificial intelligence, big data and algorithms. It aims to build intelligent factories and while also upgrading cross-border ecommerce services.  

Additional Learnings

• Cider offers an extensive FAQ section on its website which provides guidance for social media collaborations with the company.

• Cider is comparable to the popular Shein, a fast-fashion brand that gained massive popularity on TikTok. Just like Shein, Cider gained its popularity from TikTok.

• The company lists small batches of hundreds of items per week and removes products within days if they fail to generate sufficient interest. 

• Demand for the Cider brand on Google grew to an all-time high in May 2021, and the brand earned views on Tiktok of up to 60 million.

Market Snapshot

• According to a research report, recently the scale of the cross-border e-commerce market has expanded rapidly. China’s cross-border e-commerce market reached CNY 12.5T ($193.5B) in 2020, up 19.04% year-on-year. It was estimated that the market size would reach CNY 14.6T in 2021.

• According to another source, the global market for fast fashion is expected to grow at a rate of 19% from 2020 to 2025. From 2025 to 2030, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.3%.

Suggested Next Reads

• ShopCider Reviews: Is it a legit seller or not? (Cinejoia, January ‘21)

• Meet Cider – the TikTok obsessed fast fashion retailer aiming to be the new Shein (Corq, May ‘21)

• Cider Is The Social-First Fashion Site Gen Z Can’t Get Enough Of (StyleCaster, August ‘21)

• How Ethical Is Cider? (Good On You, December ‘21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

NewStore operates a platform for retailers which allows them to run their stores on the iPhone. The company’s omnichannel solutions create an exquisite shopping experience for customers of a partner brand, by combining mobile POS, order management, clienteling, and inventory. NewStore delivers its omnichannel store solution in over 40 countries.

Founded in 2015, NewStore is headquartered in Boston, US, and has offices in New York City, Berlin, Hanover and Erfurt. To date, it has raised a total of $155.4M in funding over 7 rounds.

About NewStore: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

As a mobile Omnichannel-as-a-Service platform, Newstore delivers a completely integrated shopping experience to its customers. Its core offering is its omnichannel platform. Partner brands may get a single platform that combines their global store network, warehouse facilities and digital properties. The platform offers the following features:

1. Cloud-based omnichannel order management

2. Omnichannel cloud, the engine that powers the platform

3. Real-time inventory management

4. Omnichannel insights for tracking business

5. NewStore Studio CMS for customizing app layout 

6. Integrations and APIs 

The store experience that is created by NewStore for its partner brands includes a Mobile POS and Checkout which streamlines checkout and customer engagement. It also includes an Endless Aisle, which makes it easy for store associates to sell inventory from any location.

The company’s global footprint also allows it to offer a variety of simplifying solutions to its subscribers, such as a variety of languages on the app, a variety of local payment methods, global tax compliance, and global shipping methods. Moreover, NewStore assists its partner brands in running their business according to global policies. For example, it offers certified cash management systems which make proving compliance easy. Reporting to tax authorities is made easy through scheduled/real-time financial reports that can be shared in a tax authority’s desired format.

How It Works

Integration for NewStore’s platform involves the company’s team of solution architects and engineers working with the brand’s team. According to chosen requirements of the brand, the teams work together to global, market, and country-specific rollouts of cloud commerce solutions. Following rollouts, seasoned retail leaders at NewStore provide customers with ongoing support for its business. 

NewStore boasts reliable customer and technical support teams that can provide service 24/7. These include domain experts that can quickly provide answers. This system minimizes any project risk and maintains a standard of quality.

When brands finally deploy NewStore’s Omnichannel solution, it can help them acquire new customers at low cost. The app can also help with improving sales by tracking customer information such as past purchases, or alerting physical stores about incoming customers through the use of geo-location tracking. Going forward, NewStore recently introduced native consumer apps through which NewStore’s partner brands can strengthen their customer relationships on all digital and physical channels.

Business Model and Pricing

By enabling a faster checkout experience and conversion of mobile customers to in-store, Newstore makes money by taking a cut of the retailer's revenue. The company has not revealed what percentage of the revenue it takes.

Traction

In the first half of 2021, NewStore grew its revenue over 100% year-over-year. NewStore also expanded its geographic footprint, which now includes 40+ countries across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Currently, NewStore partners with over 50 retail brands around the world. It’s website boasts the diversity of its team as having 24 different nationalities. The company caters to 15+ languages, and has a team of more than 200 people spread across 2 continents. The company also shares the impact of its omnichannel offering on its partner brands in the exact following words:

1. 7x higher mobile shopping conversion rates

2. 15% lift in store GMV from endless aisle

3. 26% lift in store conversion

4. 9x increase in customer data capture

5. 4x increase in customer lifetime value (CLV)

Founder(s)

Stephan Schambach: Founder and CEO at Newstore. Stephan is a German entrepreneur who created the first standard software for online shopping in 1995 called Intershop. He also founded Demandware in 2004.

History and Evolution

NewStore was founded in 2015 by Stephan Schambach. Prior to NewStore, Stephan had founded tech companies Intershop and Demandware. He designed the first ever software for online shopping and put retail on cloud, which meant he had significant experience with the online retail industry. With his history and expertise of online platforms, Stephan came up with the idea of Newstore as the retail experience was rapidly moving towards mobile platforms. With the establishment of Newstore, he sought to change the market once again, this time by solving the omnichannel problem facing so many retailers and brands. 

In 2021, NewStore secured $45M in funding and announced its intentions to use the amount to ramp up its commercial operations and product development, as well as to increase its global presence. The company also intended to increase its employee base.

In January 2022, NewStore acquired High Street Mobile. With this move, NewStore added an offering of native consumer apps to its omnichannel platform. This offering will allow partner retailers to create unique mobile experiences that integrate their digital channels with their brick-and-mortar stores, which can be considered an extension of the company’s previous offerings. This also means that going forward, High Street Mobile will operate under the NewStore brand name. Following this acquisition, High Street Mobile’s founder commended Stephan over his smart approach towards online retail. In a comment that sheds light on NewStore’s success, he stated, “Retail apps are not a new concept, but few brands have gotten this channel right. They aren't meant to replace the website or mobile web experience. Instead, they should complement those channels and create a powerful new place for consumers to bond with the brands they love.” 

NewStore’s services and cloud infrastructure is designed to cater to brands operating across multiple countries and borders. It helps its brands to not only create a seamless experience for their customers, but also expand around the world with its platform which supports multiple languages and currencies, and multiple payment and delivery methods.

Additional Learnings

• According to a source, NewStore equips its partner’s store associates with iPhones for mobile checkout, endless aisle, store fulfillment and inventory.

• NewStore’s omni channel platform can either be adopted all in one go, or module by module. This hinges on a brand’s position in their omnichannel journey and their preferences. 

• NewStore won the Top Supplier Retail Award 2020 on 18 February 2020. A partner brand Decathlon had won the Best Omnichannel Solution for leveraging the NewStore Omnichannel Platform.

• NewStore Studio is an app content management system. It is responsible for providing retailers with all the relevant tools to create customized and engaging app experiences.

• Newstore has customer support in North America, UK, parts of western Europe, and several countries in APAC.  

Market Snapshot

• In 2017, Harvard Business Review published a study on 46,000 people which revealed that 73% shoppers liked to shop via multiple channels during their shopping journey. Moreover, for omnichannel shoppers greater loyalty was observed. Within 6 months of theri Omnichannel shopping experience, those customers did 23% more repeat shopping from the same brand. These statistics reveal the importance of an Omnichannel strategy for retail.

• It was predicted that by 2022, smartphones would play a role in 90% of all digitally-influenced sales. By 2023, 58% of retail sales would be influenced by digital technology. This means that these sales either will occur online or may occur in-store but be influenced by digital technologies.

• By 2023, smartphones’ influence will grow to represent $1.4T in retail sales.

Next Suggested Reads

• Stephan Schambach Launches NewStore, Secures $38 Million in Funding, and Signs Leading Luxury Fashion Brands (Business Wire, September ‘15)

• Newstore Omnichannel as a Service (NewStore, ‘15)

• Must-track Omnichannel Retail Metrics (NewStore, May ‘19)

• Internationalization - Creating Consistent Omnichannel Experiences for Global Brands (NewStore)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2015, Turkey-headquartered Getir provides a grocery delivery service that promises delivery in under 10 minutes across their selection of 1,500 everyday items.

The company has achieved hypergrowth over the past couple of years, standing at a $7.7B valuation in November 2021.

Getir has now raised over $1B in from the likes of Silver Lake, Mubadala, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, with the vast majority of that capital coming across 3 rounds in the first 6 months of 2021.

About Getir: Website, Linkedin

Business Overview & Products

Getir’s core business is its ultrafast grocery delivery service that allows customers to receive groceries in under 10 minutes from a selection of 1,500 products. In addition to this core offering, the company has also launched 4 additional services:

• Getir Food – Delivery from restaurants in under 30 minutes

• Getir More – Delivery from a wider range of SKUs (~4,000) in under 30 minutes

• Getir Water – Bottled water delivery service

• Getir Locals – Delivery of products from local shops within minutes 

The company currently operates across 81 cities in Turkey, 7 countries across Europe, and entered the US market as well in November 2021.

How It Works

The company runs a network of dark stores from which groceries are delivered. These dark stores are set-up and operated to be as efficient as possible, with data from a NY Times report sharing that the average time to pack an order at one facility on a given day was 103 seconds[1].

As of June 2021, they were operating 400 such dark stores across 30 cities in Turkey and an additional 20 stores in London. They were reported to be opening 10 stores / month in Britain with a plan to have 100 by the end of the year[2].

In Turkey, 95% of these dark stores are independently owned franchises. Although the franchise model hasn’t been leveraged overseas yet, that approach has been cited as a likely strategy once Getir has gained footing in new markets[3].

Deliveries are completed through Getir’s own fleet of drivers delivering over electric bicycles and mopeds. Rather than categorizing their drivers as gig workers or contractors, all drivers are categorized as employees - with access to holiday pay and pensions[4].

The owned warehousing and delivery network allows the company to optimize speed of delivery and also purchase items at wholesale rates, something pre-existing competitors like Deliveroo and Instacart are currently unable to do given their reliance on purchasing and packing from grocery stores. The lower SKU count – 1,500 for Getir as opposed to the average grocery store which stocks 39,000+ SKUs – also enables them to be more efficient when it comes to forecasting and packing.

Business Model & Pricing

The company purchases grocery items at wholesale rates from distributors and then sells them at a 5-10% rate higher than what customers would pay at a supermarket. Getir also charges a delivery fee, which in London was £1.99. Orders must meet a minimum of £10.

Traction

Although revenue or profit numbers have not been mentioned, the founder in an interview with the Financial Times stated they were profitable in Turkey while in a separate interview with the New York Times he stated they had hit profitability in certain neighborhoods.

In March 2021, the company was reported to have about 3.5M active users and their app had been downloaded close to 15 million times. The no. of downloads grew to 34M within the next 10 months according to a source. Yet another source reveals the company delivers over 75,000 packages per day and the GetirFood service allows delivery from over 15,000 restaurants across Turkey. 

In terms of growth, the company has expanded across 60 new Turkish cities since March 2021 and entered the US market via Chicago and New York City in November 2021.

Founder(s) & Team

Nazim Salur: Co-Founder and CEO at Getir. Nazim previously founded BiTaksi, Turkey’s largest rideshare app.

Serkan Borançılı: Co-Founder at Getir. Serkan previously founded GittiGidiyor, an online marketplace in Turkey that was acquired by eBay.

Tuncay Tütek: Co-Founder at Getir. Tuncay was previously Marketing Manager for New Categories at PepsiCo Turkey.

History & Evolution

The concept for Getir was developed by Nazim Salur, previously the founder of Turkey’s largest ride-hailing app, BiTaksi. As he tells the story, after seeing how quickly BiTaksi was able to connect riders with drivers (under 3 minutes on average) he felt there was an opportunity to match customers with other services in a similarly quick fashion. He felt groceries were particularly well suited for this.

The company started with 300 employees on their first day of operations to run the warehouse distribution centers and deliver within the 10-minute window they promised. Initially starting with a selection of 300 SKUs, they have now expanded to 1,500 items. The business has also expanded to launch the additional services highlighted in the Business Overview section above.

Although the founders highlighted Turkey was less impacted by Covid than other markets, the pandemic did cause them to reach some middle-aged and older audiences that were previously less willing to try grocery delivery.

The company launched in London – their first foreign market – in January 2021 followed by launches in Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin by the summer of 2021. They also acquired a Spanish startup in July 2021 with operations in Spain and Italy to expand into those markets. In November 2021, Getir acquired a UK-based grocery delivery startup known as Weezy. This move supports the company’s bid to ramp up its presence in the UK, coupled with their announcement to invest about $134M for establishing a network of local stores across the country.

Additional Learnings

• Founders reportedly owned over 60% of the company prior to the round announced in June 2021. Given they raised <10% of the valuation at that round, they would still own >50% despite raising almost $1B in the first 6 months of 2021.

• In London, one of their popular ad campaigns has been to offer new customers £15 of groceries (~$21 USD) for 10 pence (~14 cents)

• Getir’s acquisition of Weezy also means that the company will take over Weezy’s dark stores in the UK, including micro fulfillment centers in London, Bristol, Brighton and Manchester.

• Getir entered the US market first through Chicago, with an aggressive marketing campaign featuring influencers in Youtube and TikTok ads. Next the company established itself in New York City. In its campaign, Getir had a focus on offering promotional rates and ultra-fast deliveries.

Market Snapshot

• Total grocery sales in the U.S were $760 Billion in 2020. CAGR 2016-21 is 3.1%. There are 42,505 businesses in this segment. 

• Digital grocery sales in the US are estimated to be at over $28 Billion in 2021 and growing at a 20% CAGR.

• The food & grocery retailing market in Turkey was estimated to be $29 Billion USD in 2019, growing at a 4% CAGR.

Suggested Next Reads

• In congested Istanbul, 2 companies get goods to you fast (Daily Sabah, January ‘16)

• The story of Getir from its co-founder, Nazim Salur (Youtube, January ‘21)

• Turkish start-up Getir launches grocery delivery service in London (Financial Times, January ‘21)

• Getir valuation triples to $7.5bn as investors chase grocery app craze (Financial Times, June ‘21)

• Can the Mad Rush to Deliver Your Groceries in 10 Minutes Be Profitable? (Bloomberg, August ‘21)

• Europe’s quick-commerce startups are overhyped: Lessons from China (Techcrunch, August ‘21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2017, Mumbai-headquartered Good Glamm Group is a direct-to-consumer beauty brand that offers an online beauty marketplace with international spa and salon products. Along with the new age beauty products that Good Glamm Group sells, it also has its own training academies and on-demand beauty services. 

The company grew a significant amount in recent years, becoming a Unicorn in November 2021 on the backs of a $150M Series D from Prosus Ventures and Warburg Pincus.

The company is backed by notable investors including french beauty major L’Occitane, silicon valley VC firms Bessemer Venture Partners & Accel, and global e-commerce giant Amazon among others.

On the Web: Website, Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram

Business Overview & Products

Good Glamm Group currently has 4 sub-brands:

• Makeup

• Skincare

• Haircare

• Sanitizing care

The brand also plans to introduce a personal-care category soon. These categories include premium cruelty-free products that are designed especially to cater to Indian consumers and their beauty needs. The brand also offers a variety of collections ranging from premium ones such as Manish Malhotra to cheaper alternatives like LIT, Liquid Matte Lipstick.  

Apart from designing and selling these products, Good Glamm Group offers aesthetician services at home through their app. Their recent acquisition of POPxo resulted in the creation of Good Glamm Groupxo, a program for beauty influencers, where they provide free Good Glamm Group products to influencers so they can create content and share it with their subscribers. The company operates across 50 cities and delivers in 1,000 towns in India, and plans to expand globally soon.

How It Works

Good Glamm Group is an online marketplace that designs and sells products created specifically for Indian consumers. These products are developed in laboratories across Italy and Germany and are 100% cruelty-free.

The company has built its own training academies where courses in beauty, hair, and makeup are offered to students. The earnings from these academies are a major contribution to the company’s total revenue. Good Glamm Group also offers on-demand beauty services which can be availed through their mobile application or via a phone call.

The company’s strategy to gain new customers relies heavily on a generous reward system. For starters, upon referring the brand to someone, the referrer either receives online points that can be used in offline stores or hefty discounts on products and services. Another way to earn points is by promoting Good Glamm Group on social media like commenting on their official posts and creating hype about new products. 

The venture is also known for its one-of-a-kind program for influencers and beauty enthusiasts called Good Glamm Groupxo which is an interactive space for influencers to share their content using products provided by the brand. The platform not only helps influencers gain more followers but also pays them for promoting the brand. 

The company’s tech-enabled stores have not only made transactions easier but also enhanced the shopping experience of customers. For instance, there are beauty advisors present at their stores that advise customers on which product suits them and fits their criteria. Moreover, customers also have the option of swatching a product at the store and then adding it to their wishlist in the app. 

During the pandemic, Good Glamm Group also introduced the option of virtually trying products which saved consumers the extra trip to stores and was quite a game-changer during the lockdown as it reduced the risk of buying wrong products. 

Business Model & Pricing

Good Glamm Group has a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model where it offers an online beauty marketplace to its consumers. The company also collects data to understand the needs of its customers and then creates content accordingly in an attempt to build a community with them. 

The company has adopted price differentiation as its key pricing strategy. With its vast collections, the company is catering to all income groups. For instance, it has lipsticks starting from INR 300 ($4.02) to INR 1000 ($13.39)+. A shipping fee of INR 99 ($1.33) is only charged when the order amount is below INR 199 ($2.66). Moreover, prices are also customized according to the store credit each customer has in their account. 

Traction

While the company refuses to reveal their revenue, in 2021 they reported an annual revenue rate of $100M which they were hoping to increase to $250M in 2022. 

The major factors driving their growth are product portfolio expansion, aggressive expansion strategy, category growing, POPxo, driving digital growth, and tier-two and tier-three driving offline. Around 98% of the online revenue comes from the Good Glamm Group website and app; the remaining 2%  comes from marketplaces. Category-wise, 75% comes from makeup while 25% comes from personal care.

The company was reported to have over 60 million monthly active users as of August 2021, with 381,889 monthly app downloads and 557,006 monthly visits to the website.[3]

Founder(s) & Team

Priyanka Gill: Co-Founder at Good Glamm Group. Priyanka, an MBA graduate from London Business School started her blogging journey from eStylista which was a huge hit. A year later, she founded POPxo, India’s largest women-centric digital platform which was later merged with Good Glamm Group and became Good Glamm Group-POPxo-Plixxo. 

Darpan Sanghvi: Co-Founder and CEO at Good Glamm Group. Darpan, an MBA graduate, previously worked as a Marketing and Business Development Manager at eBay, and as a Business Analysis Manager at Celanese. He also founded Sanghvi, one of the largest luxury salon and spa operators in Asia. 

Naiyya Saggi: Co-Founder at Good Glamm Group. Naiyya, a Harvard graduate, previously worked as a Consultant at The Bridge Spa Group and as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company. She also founded BabyChakra, India’s largest platform for pregnancy and childcare.

History & Evolution

Darpan Sanghvi, a fresh MBA graduate returned to India in the early 2000s and realized the lack of international brands present in his country. With the idea to globalize brands in India, he contacted L’Occitane and managed to score a master franchise with them. For the next 10 years, he launched 25-30 international spas in India. It was during this time he realized the market gap in the beauty industry, how international brands were not fulfilling Indian consumers’ needs and neither were they tech-enabled. With this vision in mind, Good Glamm Group was founded in 2016 as a beauty brand that made looking glamorous effortless. 

Initially, the company started with a makeup line to establish its dominance in the market. Their target was to create premium face products that felt comfortable on the skin to gain the consumer’s trust. Once their first product, Total Makeover FF cream took off, they slowly expanded to other makeup products. 

In its 12th month of existence, the brand ventured into different collections to cater to all kinds of consumers, helping them create price differentiation. For instance, with their first line LIT they targeted the low-income group, and in another line, Manish Malhotra targeted the elite class. 

The next year, 2018 was spent on exploring different lines and expanding portfolios. Since the makeup line took off, Good Glamm Group ventured into skincare as well as hair care. In 2019, the company saw a major 400x growth as a result of its expansion. The company’s 90% of transactions were being made on its own platform whereas other brands were relying on marketplaces for transactions. This gave Good Glamm Group a competitive edge over all its competitors. 

In 2020, sales plummeted initially due to the pandemic because Good Glamm Group’s product lines did not fall under the essentials category. However, in August, Good Glamm Group acquired POPxo to expand into the online content space. This move did wonders for the company as its monthly customer acquisition numbers rose to 60,000. It also helped the company master the art of content to commerce which in turn reeled in more consumers than ever. In 9 months, Good Glamm Group started acquiring 250,000 customers every month.

In 2021, Good Glamm Group acquired BabyChakra, a parenting platform that offers information and tips related to parenting, The Moms Co, a D2D mother and baby care brand, ScoopWhoop, a digital media and lifestyle content platform and Miss Malini, a celebrity media and influencer talent management network. 

The company that started its operations in Mumbai now has 15000 points of sale in 70 major cities of India including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Chandigarh, Kolhapur, Jaipur, Jammu and Kashmir, Ahmedabad, Surat, Amritsar, Kolkata, Lucknow, Bhopal, Indore, Meerut, Goa, and Ludhiana. It also delivers in 1,000 cities across India and plans to expand globally and cater to a wider audience. The startup initially started with 450 services and now has 15,000 services with a pool of 1,800 beauty professionals. It delivers close to 600 services a day.

From archive.org 

Additional Learnings

In September 2021, Good Glamm Group was rebranded as Good Glamm Group. This move was made to consolidate the company’s numerous businesses under one umbrella brand. By becoming the Digital House of Brand, the company aims to be a one-stop-shop for women in every stage of their lives, from teenage years to motherhood. 

Market Snapshot

• The beauty industry was worth $511B in 2021 with a valuation supposed to exceed $716B by 2025 with an annual compounded growth rate of 4.75%. 

• India’s beauty industry, worth $27B saw a boom driven by online shopping and influencers.

Suggested Next Reads

• How Good Glamm Group, an online color cosmetics brand, achieves 166% uplift in conversions (Webengage) 

• [Podcast] Future of beauty and personal care: Good Glamm Group tracking the evolution of the category in India (Anand Daniel, Your Story, Aug ‘21)

• India's Good Glamm Group to invest in NPD, data and offline after funding boost - CEO (Amanda Lim, Cosmetics Design-Asia, March ‘21)

• How Good Glamm Group Leveraged Its Community To Drive Retention For Content Commerce Play (Inc 42, March ‘21)

• Darpan Sanghvi of Sanghvi Brands, on creating India’s largest bespoke beauty services platform ‘My Glamm’ (BNI Links, LinkedIn, Sept ‘16)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Utah, Pattern serves as an authorized marketplace seller for consumer brands and helps them grow their e-commerce sales. Pattern takes over complete responsibility for its client’s presence on marketplaces and tracks and reports key success metrics to them.

Pattern works with over 100 brands and leverages its expertise and proprietary technology to sell their products across marketplaces. It has grown to become the 3rd largest seller on Amazon in the world and also sells products across the likes of Walmart.com, MercadoLibre, JD.com, Noon, Tmall, eBay, Lazada and others.

To date, Pattern has raised a total of $277M in funding over 2 rounds. The company’s last round valued it at a $2B pre-money valuation.

About Pattern: Website, LinkedIn 

Business Overview and Products

Pattern’s core business is its Partnership Model. Once a brand partners with them, it buys the client’s inventory and sells it on their behalf on online marketplaces. This drives up sales figures immediately for clients. In addition to this, there are integrated solutions that are provided as part of the partnership, which include:

1. Insights and reporting – monitor live performance 

2. Advertising and SEO – optimize advertising campaigns

3. Creative Strategy – enhance creative strategy

4. Brand Protection – protect brand from unauthorized sellers

5. Logistics and Fulfillment – accelerate logistics and fulfillment outcomes

6. Global Marketplace Management – proactively manage brand presence

7. Ecommerce Consulting – expand to global marketplaces

Pattern provides e-commerce expertise across North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, MENA region, Australia and India. 

How it works

The unique thing about Pattern is that it does not simply offer its clients a software program or consultation about marketing strategies for their products. Instead, it purchases their stock of inventory, allowing clients’ sales figures to shoot up. Then Pattern optimizes these sales by figuring out where the problems are and fixing them.

Once inventory is bought from a partner, it is sold in the first few months on their behalf on Amazon and other marketplaces. When the stock depletes, it is replenished from the partner as it is sold. Here onwards, Pattern works with its partner to boost sales. It deploys its expertise of international consultants, brand managers, marketplace scientists, customer support representatives, advertising and logistics specialists to assist the partner.

Once orders are booked and sales are made, Pattern takes full responsibility of ensuring product quality and customers receiving their products in good delivery time. Pattern’s distribution centers are spread out across the regions they operate in. For distribution of product, there are 75+ quality controls in place and two different programs from Amazon are utilized:

1. FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon): Amazon's warehousing and fulfillment service that allows sellers to send inventory to an Amazon warehouse and have their orders shipped by Amazon

2. FBM (Fulfilled By Merchant): Fulfillment method in which the seller (Pattern, in this case) takes full responsibility for storing inventory and shipping orders.  

To manage revenue growth and brand control, Pattern then uses critical data insights from its one-of-a-kind proprietary software called Predict. This software tracks pricing, handles forecasting, manages reviews, and reverse-engineers SEO algorithms. Another software is an automated advertising technology that identifies arbitrage opportunities, pricing inefficiencies, and emerging trends using mathematical formulas that predict marketplace movements. 

The last aspect of e-commerce selling is global expansion. Once the client’s product is stabilized and growing on Amazon and other domestic marketplaces, Pattern researches global expansion opportunities for the client which can help them enter and expand to other markets. 

Business Model and Pricing

To sell products on Amazon, a business normally gets charged several kinds of fees, including base accrual fees, damage and freight allowance fees, and more. Pattern consolidates these multiple costs into a single subsidized fee. Within this fee, Pattern provides all services that are needed by clients to grow their brands on an eCommerce platform.

At the onset of the partnership, Pattern pays upfront for the inventory that it buys and then markets it across different platforms. Pattern has grown sales for brands from $3M to $26M.

Traction

From its humble beginnings, Pattern was able to generate good revenue growth exceeding 300% for 4 years. In 2018 Amazon’s online marketplaces produced around $123B in revenue, where more than half of the units were sold via its 4M 3rd-party sellers. Revenue-wise, Pattern has been cited consistently as a top-5 seller among the top sellers to have contributed to those numbers. 

In 2020, co-founder Melanie Alder stated that the company was on track to generate $500M in revenue for the year. According to an October 2021 article, the company is expecting to exceed $1B in revenue in 2022. In the next few years, Patterns founders envision big plans for their company. They see the company continuing to develop its technology and expand its global presence to reach even more brands around the world.

Pattern now has more than 900 employees, and works with over 100 brands globally. It also has 100+ global ecommerce consultants to help its partner brands boost their sales on the global marketplace. It has operations in 18 countries.

Founder(s) & Team

Melanie Alder: Founder and CIO. Before Pattern, Melanie served as a Real estate executive for 11 years, while also co-founding RTO Investors where she served as managing partner.

David Wright: Founder and CEO. Before Pattern, David spent his career as a data fanatic and technology executive. He served as a database team manager for 5 years.

History and Evolution

The company was founded by David Wright and Melanie Alder in 2013. It started off by the name of iServe, with David and Melaine selling fridge magnets and other small products on Amazon from Melanie’s apartment. From the beginning, Pattern faced steep marketplace regulations and stiff competition as it navigated the ecommerce world. 

In 2014, iServe launched an ecommerce software for pricing protection and control called TriGuardian. It also formally moved its headquarters into a small office in Utah. Within the next 2 years, iServe scaled up its operations and moved into a larger warehouse for conducting them. By 2016, iServe had opened warehouses in Kentucky and Toronto, and with the business growing the founders took their first-ever paycheck 3 years after having started the company. 

In 2018, iServe acquired a global ecommerce consultancy called Practicology. This marked a pivotal point for the company as Practicology was based out of London and it provided iServe a good base for deeply penetrating the European market. It also rebranded itself to “Pattern” at this point, while expanding its marketplace expertise to clients in Europe, MENA, China, and Australia.

It was in 2019 that Pattern finally launched its authorized marketplace seller model internationally, and began representing brands on Amazon in Europe, the UAE and Australia. By 2020 Pattern launched its Amazon business in KSA and began representing brands on Noon too. After a funding round of $225M in October 2021, Pattern achieved a $2B valuation.

Pattern now operates in over 7 regions across the world, and has global offices in 10 countries. With its newly secured funding, Pattern plans to extend its global presence, reach more brands and develop its tech and services platform. 

Additional Learnings

• Pattern is now Utah’s first female founded/co-founded unicorn, as well as one of the largest raises by an ecommerce accelerator.

• Pattern has announced a Marketplace Performance Score to help brands maximize e-commerce revenue. Developed in-house, MPS measures the performance of a brand's best product based on three key drivers and 16 dimensions that impact a brand’s revenue growth. 

• In February 2022, Pattern acquired Amplifi.io, a digital asset management and product information management platform. Amplifi’s technology will help Pattern’s partner brands to boost their products on more ecommerce platforms.

• Pattern allows partners to back out of a partnership if they are unhappy with results. It currently has a 98% client retention rate.

Market Snapshot

• In 2021, the global e-commerce retail market stands at $6T. It is expected to grow by 53% by 2024.  

• In 2021 alone, ecommerce accelerators like Pattern and its competitors raised nearly $600M in funding.   

• Pattern’s past performance has indicated that in the first year of partnership, clients achieve 40% revenue growth and 100% review responses. 

• Pattern has secured six registered trademarks in the advertising business category. These trademarks protect the intellectual properties that were developed by Pattern for its express use.

Suggested Next Reads

• Pattern Founders Discuss Company Story, Industry Success, & Future Plans at Silicon Slopes (Accelerate, May ‘19)

• Pattern bags $225M; CEO says ecommerce accelerators ‘will win the day’ over aggregators (Techcrunch, October ‘21)

• How Pattern Helps Company Direct Sales Strategy (Accelerate, April ‘21)

• All the cost savings of a Pattern Partnership (Accelerate, January ‘21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Formerly known as ParkWhiz, Arrive offers smart parking solutions. It provides a seamless experience that predicts and recommends best parking solutions for people’s journey. These mobility services are offered through apps, websites, voice platforms and in-dash integrations. They include smart cities, automakers, fleets, venues, navigation and voice platforms, as well as its own ParkWhiz and BestParking consumer brands.

Arrive is headquartered in Chicago, US. It has raised $61.1M in funding over 6 rounds with its latest funding in February 2020. It is funded by 16 investors and has acquired 4 organizations. 

About Arrive: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview and Products

Arrive is the leading provider of solutions for the last-mile of mobility. It has partnered with over 100 companies, municipalities and car manufacturers to integrate its parking solutions. It enables drivers to reserve, locate and access guaranteed parking space through its ParkWhiz and BestParking applications as well as developing voice control and in-dash navigation systems. Essentially, by purchasing parking through its applications, drivers can easily enter and exit parking lots or garages without making a reservation or taking a ticket at the gate.

Arrive started out targeting the fragmented North American parking market. It now has major distribution partners such as Amazon Alexa, Ticketmaster, Honda and TomTom.

How It Works

Arrive provides cutting-edge technology related to mobility. It ensures drivers, fleets and connected vehicles reach where they are going without any bumps in the road. For this, Arrive partners with companies, brands and municipalities to provide smooth parking and other mobility-related services. 

Arrive-powered technology can help optimize Smart Cities by creating a connected urban ecosystem that includes transit, tolling, parking and other mobility services. It helps municipalities of any scale integrate parking into one seamless network through technology such as Bluetooth sensors and beacons, as well as parking inventory to power city apps and other connected products. 

It can be integrated into vehicles, offering friction-free parking solutions for the drivers and connected vehicles of fleets and mobility companies. Arrive partners with landowners and parking operators to offer short-term parking rates and easy access to facilities.

Arrive offers its solutions for venues and events. It provides pre-sale services and ticketing-parking bundling for hundreds of venues across the US and Canada. Fans can book parking from the time they buy tickets to the days leading up to – and including – game day.

It also offers parking solutions for local and real estate. It makes it easier for tenants and visitors to real-estate property. Clients who utilize this service benefit from Arrive taking the hassle out of parking so their customers can enjoy the rest of their on-site experience. 

Business Model and Pricing

Arrive operates as a marketplace connecting drivers with parking facilities.

Instead of setting prices for the parking facilities, it allows its facility partners to set the rates. Arrive monetizes on both ends – charging both consumers and the facility a small fee. Although their take rate is not listed online, when the company launched it was reported to be 10% for consumers and 15% for parking facilities.

In 2019, Arrive launched dynamic pricing for lots and garages across the US through its ParkWhiz and BestParking apps. After its first deployment of this model, Arrive experienced the following surges:

• An average revenue uplift of 163% across the US when booked through ParkWhiz and BestParking.

• The total number of transactions on ParkWhiz and BestParking increased by 137% on average.

• 50% increase of occupancy during periods of low demand.

• 257% increase of multi-day transactions for urban locations with ParkWhiz or BestParking.

Traction

The Arrive platform powers two award-winning consumer apps, ParkWhiz and BestParking. Over 40 million people to date have used these web, app, voice and API-based solutions to find and book convenient, economical parking. These customers are from 230 cities across the US and Canada. They have access to the largest transactional parking network in North America through Arrive-powered parking reservations and drive-up, friction-free parking.

Arrive has about 500+ distribution partners, who enable customers to access Arrive-powered parking solutions.

Founder(s)

Aashish Dalal (LinkedIn): Co-founder and Chairman of Arrive. Aashish is a leading expert on e-parking and is published regularly in industry trade journals. Prior to Arrive, he worked at IBM Global Business Services. 

Jon Thornton (LinkedIn): Co-Founder and ex-CTO of Arrive. Jon is an experienced engineering leader with deep product development and people management experience. Currently, he is the Director of Engineering at Squarespace.

History and Evolution

Arrive was founded in 2006 originally by the name of Parkwhiz. It started out by offering 2 parking-related apps in North America: ParkWhiz and Best Parking. Both apps are still active today and enable users to locate, book, reserve and pay for parking without any hassle. Around 2017, the company started offering its technology and network to any business looking to provide parking as a service, eliminating the hassle of having to build the infrastructure from scratch. 

Today, Arrive’s clients include car and navigation companies, sports and theater stadiums, and connected cities. In fact Arrive has a diverse, top-tier clientele: entities that use the company’s technology include major sports teams in North America (such as NBA, NFL and NHL), major ticketing platforms (such as Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and tickets.com) and top auto companies (such as Honda, General motors, and Ford) who integrated Arrive’s technology into their cars. Even cities going for smart ecosystems (such as Sacramento, Detroit, and Las Vegas) have been integrating the technology.

In 2018, Arrive acquired an Israeli company called CodiPark, which became a source of important R&D for Arrive. To scale from a consumer app developer to an enterprise company, CodiPark provides important human resources in the form of engineers. In the future, the company aims to achieve complete friction-free mobility, by bringing together different vendors to form a fully connected ecosystem. It aims to make mobility smooth and seamless which allows customers to plan their travel routes through a single app or interface rather than multiple apps. 

In January 2021, Arrive merged with Flashparking, with the aim to help parking garages via digital parking solutions and a range of micro-mobility tools designed to reimagine what a parking garage can be. 

Additional Learnings

• In December 2019, Arrive announced its plans to open its first R&D center in Tel Aviv to spur growth which began from the acquisition of Israeli CodiPark in 2018. The company plans to swiftly expand its employee base of developers there as well. 

• In June 2020, Arrive launched a new payment option. This option simplifies the payment experience for drivers by allowing anyone having Apple Pay or Google Pay to tap a sign, authorize payment and park without touching any tickets, buttons or payment machines.

• In January 2021, it was announced that Arrive would merge with FlashParking. The combined entity would offer B2B and B2C seamless digital parking solutions and mobility technologies that would drastically improve consumer parking and mobility experiences.

• In March 2021, Arrive announced a partnership with Luum, where Arrive’s Smart Parking service would be made available to employers through Luum’s Commute Management Platform. 

Market Snapshot

There is a scope for offering parking services in North America because there are no single governmental entities that handle mobility and parking. There are actual inconsistencies amongst municipalities, which cause further fragmentation in the parking market.

The coronavirus pandemic has also been responsible for changing commuter and parking behavior. Consumers increasingly want a flexible, connected experience to navigate the changing mobility environment. They prefer convenient access to parking with contactless payment. In an article from 2021, several observations were noted:

• Personal car usage is increasing with nearly 40% of commuters in major U.S. cities driving alone to work post-COVID, as opposed to the 23% who drove solo to work pre-pandemic. 

• Electric vehicles are becoming viable contenders to traditional gasoline powered vehicles. EV sales in the US in 2020 were up by 10% while ICE vehicle sales were down by 15%. 

• Micro-mobility and food and grocery delivery have seen historic use, and it is expected this will only grow.

In light of these changes, the parking industry has very lucrative opportunities.

Suggested Next Reads

1. CEO of Mobility Company Arrive Shares His Vision of the Future of the Industry (CTech, January ‘21)

2. Flashparking and Arrive Mobility agree merger to create seamless digital parking solutions (Auto Futures, January ‘21) 

3. Parking Startups Are Cashing In On America’s Traffic Surge (Bloomberg Businessweek, July ‘21)

4. The Arrival of Seamless Parking (Middle Market Growth, June ‘20)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources. Our teardowns are quick snapshots on the fastest-growing companies globally – you can learn more about this initiative & subscribe here.

Snapshot

Founded in 2019, Airlift is an express grocery delivery service headquartered in Lahore, Pakistan. The company aims to deliver essentials in under 30 minutes across cities in Pakistan and recently expanded into South Africa.

The company’s model resembles that of quick-commerce players that have attracted billions in funding globally such as Getir (Turkey), Gorillas (Germany), Jokr (US), blinkit (India), and others.

Airlift started as a private transportation network providing a bus service for commuters. However, the coronavirus pandemic led to a suspension of Airlift’s transportation services and forced the company to pivot.

The company initially raised eyebrows in 2019 for raising a notable Series A for its transit business from First Round Capital, the firm that led Uber’s seed round. Airlift has in total raised $109.2M to date. The last round, an $85M Series B by Harry Stebbings and Josh Buckley, was reported to value the company at a reported $275M.

About Airlift: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview & Products

Airlift Express delivers a large range of products in 30-60 minutes to consumers. Their service covers categories such as food supplies, household supplies, pharma, stationery, fresh fruits and vegetables, and electronics. Delivery fees are tiered depending on the size of the cart and are waived above a certain cart size. The service is currently available across 8 cities in Pakistan and 3 cities in South Africa.

The company’s initial transportation service called Airlift Transit was halted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained suspended. The website of their transit service cites the suspension is temporary – it remains unclear whether they will resume service in the future given the pivot.

How It Works

Via the Airlift Express service, the company offers express delivery of grocery orders within 30 minutes. Shoppers can choose from a wide selection of products that are delivered with fixed transport charges depending on the order value. Delivery charges are waived over a certain cart size. The company supports both Cash on Delivery (COD) as well as digital payments.

Customers can place an order through their mobile apps or website. Orders can be live-tracked and customers can receive real-time updates if they prefer. Orders may also be canceled within 60 seconds of placing. For scheduled deliveries, customers may cancel orders an hour before their scheduled time slot.

On Airlift’s end, it operates a network of mid-fulfillment centers and dark stores that receive inventory from manufacturers and suppliers. The company leverages advanced demand forecasting algorithms to predict which products will be in demand and stocks the fulfillment centers and dark stores appropriately. The service is operational 24 hours a day in select areas, and from 8am-11pm in others. The service is accessible seven days a week.

Business Model & Pricing

For any orders placed via Airlift express, delivery charges vary according to order size. There is a minimum order limit of PKR 500. The delivery rates vary as such:

• Flat fee of PKR 100 for orders below PKR 500

• PKR 30 for orders above PKR 500 and below PKR 1000  

• PKR 10 for orders above PKR 1000

• Free delivery on orders above PKR 10,000

The company often offers promotions with free delivery on smaller cart sizes.

In addition to delivery charges, Airlift makes a margin on each product sold much like a traditional retailer.

Traction

A deep dive by Pakistan Today highlighted many insightful metrics on Airlift although several were questioned in the report. Airlift was reported to have reached a $50M GMV run rate as of September 2021. Its average order value was reported to be PKR 1,285 (~$7.30) with over 10,000 daily orders being reported.

In its Series B announcement on TechCrunch from August 2021, the company was reported to operate more than 30 dark stores. The company also highlighted plans to expand internationally, starting with South Africa.

A MENAbytes report from August 2021 reported Airlift’s blended customer acquisition cost (CAC) to be $5.

Founder(s) & Team

Usman Gul: Co-founder and CEO at Airlift. Prior to Airlift, he was a Sr. Manager in charge of enterprise partnerships at DoorDash at their headquarters in San Francisco.

Meher Farrukh: Co-founder at Airlift. Prior to Airlift, she was a finance analyst at Coca-Cola Beverages in Pakistan.

Ahmed Ayub: Co-founder at Airlift. He previously founded a company called EXPERIA and had been an executive at several IT companies in Pakistan.

History and Evolution

Founder Usman Gul came up with the idea of Airlift after a vacation he took to Lahore. During this, he experienced an inefficiency in the local transportation options. To deal with the problem of congestion, he and fellow co-founders Meher and Ahmed launched a pilot project in the city in March 2019. The pilot was initially self-funded. 

In less than 5 months of its operations, Airlift grew to 50,000 rides per month. It also managed to secure funding worth $2.2M in the 5th month of operations. The company’s launch raised a lot of praise as ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Careem were attracting criticism for putting more cars on traffic-clogged roads. This was an issue, especially in already congested cities, where options for local transport are still far and few.

By July 2019, the startup had expanded its operations to Karachi and acquired about 50,000 riders in Lahore in less than 5 months of operations. When the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020, it disrupted all public transport and Airlift Transit was temporarily suspended. Operations were originally halted until March 2021, however, it remains to be seen whether the transport service will be resumed or not. To curb losses, the company quickly looked towards other avenues.

Airlift then introduced an online grocery service known as "Airlift Express" in July 2020 and is currently fully focused on this quick commerce model. The service has been expanded to South Africa. Airlift closed its latest Series B funding round of $85M on 18th August 2021 and aims to expand this service to other countries.

Product & Company Reviews

Competitive Intel

Ad Intel & Value Props

• Airlift Express’ mainly focuses its ads on its free delivery offering and 30-minute delivery guarantee.

• The company likewise does ad campaigns targeted at new geographies it services

• A few of its ads are focused on seasonal discounts and offerings.

View all Facebook Ads: Active Ads Link

Additional Learnings

• Prior to Airlift, founder Usman worked at the food delivery business DoorDash (headquartered in San Francisco). The founder and CEO of DoorDash, Tony Xu, was among the first few angel investors to support Airlift.

• According to a source, the transport sector contributes about a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions in Pakistan. Airlift was launched upon the principle of reducing carbon footprint in the country.

• There is a program in place called the Airlift Rewards Program. It offers customers the chance to earn points on every item they purchase. These points can then be redeemed for free grocery coupons amounting to PKR 1500 in the Airlift Rewards section of the app.

• Airlift may be on its way to becoming Pakistan’s first-ever unicorn.

Market Snapshot

• The food and grocery retail market in Pakistan generated total revenues of $59.3B in 2018, indicating a CAGR of roughly 8.4% from 2014 to 2018.

• In 2020, the grocery market in Pakistan was around $48B out of the total $125B retail market in the country.

• Internet penetration in Pakistan has gone up by 35% as of January 2020, indicating an increased dependency on online shopping as a whole.

Suggested Next Reads

• Pakistan’s Airlift raises $85 million for its quick commerce startup, eyes international expansion (TechCrunch, August ’21)

• Interview: In a conversation with Usman Gul, co-founder & CEO of Airlift (MENAbytes, October ’19)

• Airlift – A great addition to Pakistan’s public transport system (The Nation, August ‘19)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2021, Bangalore-headquartered Mensa Brands is a startup that acquires digital direct-to-consumer brands and helps them scale within their home market and globally. Currently, the company has 15 brands in apparel, personal care, home, and beauty. In November 2021, the company became India’s fastest and globally second-fastest unicorn after raising $135M in a Series B funding round led by Falcon Edge, bringing its valuation to $1.2B.

Mensa Brands is backed by marquee investors like Accel, Falcon Edge, Tiger Global, Norwest, and debt partners in Alteria and Innoven Capital. The company’s brand partners are Karagiri, Dennis Lingo, Villain, Ishin, Anubhutee, Priyaasi, DL, Helea, Hubberholme, LilPicks, Folkuture, and more. 

On the Web: Website, Linkedin

Business Overview & Products

Mensa Brands acquires brands in the following categories:

• Fashion

• Beauty

• Personal Care

• Home

The company spans across 5 cities with offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurugram and retails largely in the US, Canada, and UK.

How It Works

Mensa Brands acquires eCommerce brands and helps them scale nationally and globally. It leverages the company’s expertise in e-commerce, technology, marketing, category management, and demand planning with a technology platform at the core. The company’s aim is to grow brands in the Home, Apparel, Beauty, Garden, and Personal Care verticals. 

With the company’s help, brands organize and optimize their inventories across leading marketplaces through their official websites and global platforms. The startup also assists brands with their product development by helping them identify consumer needs and launching a product accordingly. Moreover, Mensa Brands executes tech-led marketing campaigns for them and optimizes the prices of their products in an attempt to make these brands a household name. 

Initially, the company buys majority stakes in brands with plans to acquire them fully in 5 years based on certain metrics and milestones. These brands are all profitable with their revenue ranging from $1M to $10M and upon acquisition, their founding teams work closely with Mensa Brands to accelerate growth on marketplaces.

The partnership process from initiation to execution is hyper-efficient and mostly the deal closes within 4-8 weeks. After the partnership, the brand’s profitability grows beyond 10x in a short span of time with the help of the company’s integration of expertise and technology.

Business Model & Pricing

Mensa Brands’ business model is inspired by Thrasio, a US-based startup that discovers top-rated and best-selling items on Amazon, buys those firms, and grows them. Similarly, Mensa Brands works in two parts: on one side it partners with emerging brands and invests in them, on the other side it accelerates brands by helping them scale and grow both domestically and internationally. 

The company earns revenue through the brands it acquires with 20% of the revenue coming from overseas markets like the US, Middle East, UK, and Southeast Asia. It features its products on e-commerce platforms and 10% from its D2C channels.

Traction

Mensa Brands has partnered with 15 brands to date, the majority of which are growing at 100% year over year. The company also has the next 7 brand partnerships in line and claims to have grown 3x of their initial plan.  Within a year, the company has managed to expand its brands globally across the US, Middle East, UK, and Southeast Asia markets by featuring its products on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Zalora, and Namshi. Mensa Brands has raised $300M in equity and debt.

Founder(s) & Team

Ananth Narayanan: Co-Founder and CEO at Mensa Brands. Ananth previously served as CEO at Myntra where his leadership led to 6x growth in 3.5 years and improved profitability. He also founded Medlife.com, an online platform, which provides pharmacy, diagnostics, and e-consultation in India. For his exceptional leadership, Anath was featured in the “India’s Hottest 40 under 40 Business Leaders” list in 2014. 

Aniket Nikumb: Founding Team at Mensa Brands. Aniket, a Columbia graduate has always been intrigued by the world of finance. Post-graduation, he interned and worked at numerous finance companies like Amansa Capital, BRX Global, etc. Aniket also founded Appaloosa Foods.   

Pawan Kumar Dasaraju: Founding Team at Mensa Brands. Pawan, a business school graduate has 13 years of successful experience in the food and fashion industry. He has worked as the Business Head at both Swiggy and Myntra, and courtesy of his expertise his departments flourished immensely. Pawan was also Founder in Residence at Entrepreneurs First, an international Talent Investor, which supports individuals to build technology companies.

History & Evolution

• In May 2021, Mensa Brands was launched in an attempt to build a technology-led ‘House of Brands’ for the e-commerce industry.

• In October 2021, the company partnered with 10 digital-first brands in apparel, beauty, and home categories to help them scale and grow.

• That month it also claimed that its partner brand, Villain, grew over 250% and Karagiri grew over 140%.

• In November 2021, just six months after its launch, Mensa Brands became profitable.

• In December 2021, the company acquired LilPicks, an emerging digital-first fashion brand in the kids wear segment, Folkulture, a home decor label that caters majorly to the USA and UK markets and High Star, a homegrown denim brand. 

• In January 2022, Mensa Brands acquired Estalon, a leather goods manufacturer and seller.

• By 2024, the company aims to create a portfolio of more than 50 ventures across fashion, home, garden, personal care, and beauty.

The website hasn’t changed since its launch in 2021.

Additional Learnings

The company classifies and invests in brands based on their run rates. For instance, brands with a $1B run rate are called break-out brands since they are growing at an exponential rate. In their case, the company invests in technology and brand building. Other brands that are growing at a steady pace are called mid brands, which is why the startup invests in category expansion and channel expansion. For emerging brands, the company focuses on growth, scaling, and finding the product-market fit. 

Suggested Next Reads

• Mensa Brands - Not just a "unicorn", the quickest one (Buildd, Nov ‘21)

• India's billion-dollar Mensa Brands is already profitable, says founder- Vigour Times (Craig Peters, Vigour Times, Nov ‘21)

• Mensa trying to be a global tech-led house of brands, says founder of India's fastest unicorn (Nayantara Rai, The Economic Times, Nov ‘17)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2019, Fast is a platform that allows users to buy items on partner merchants’ sites with one click and no login. This streamlines and standardizes the online shopping experience for customers across all platforms, allowing them to quickly purchase everything they need with a single click instead of having to fill out lengthy information forms.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco, founded by Domm Holland and Allison Barr Allen, and funded by Stripe, Addition, Index Ventures, Susa Ventures and Sugar Capital. It has raised a total of $124.5M in funding over 4 rounds. The latest funding was raised in January 2021 from a Series B round. 

About Fast: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview & Products

Fast provides online login and checkout solutions, which are designed to provide users with a secure shopping experience. Unlike giants like Amazon, Shopify, Apple Pay, and PayPal, which also offer one-click checkouts, Fast is not a closed ecosystem. It works with any device and with any product. Like Shopify Pay only works for Shopify, or Apple Pay only works for Apple devices, this is not the case for Fast.

Fast aims to shorten the process of online transactions and engagements. For this it has developed what it calls a “Fast Ecosystem”, and it comprises 3 products. These include the Fast Login, which is for logging in. The Fast Login is live on hundreds of websites and serves tens of thousands of logins a month. Another product called Fast Checkout is for purchases. The last product is Post-purchase, and this is where every single purchase made on every store across the internet comes into a customer’s “Fast feed”. This allows them to track deliveries, download receipts and re-order items.

However, it must be noticed that when a customer uses Fast Checkout for the first time, they will go through a traditional checkout experience. Here they will have to supply their personal information, select a shipping option and then complete their purchase. But after this first purchase, customers never have to re-enter their information again and can simply use the Fast Checkout button for an instant buy.

How It Works

Fast aims to address an immediate pain point, which is the checkout part of the online shopping experience. Instead of having to fill out lengthy forms, customers can simply click on a button to complete their purchase.  

For this, it partners with online stores. All online stores that subscribe to Fast can install Fast on their website in less than an hour. This is done by placing buttons next to each product so that customers who have signed up and stored their credit card details with Fast can click to purchase immediately. As soon as the Fast Checkout button is clicked, it will instantly access customers’ payment, shipping and communications information without them having to log in, remember an email, password, or even have a debit card on hand. Customers get to bypass the account creation or form-filling at whichever website they are shopping at because their information has been recorded with Fast. 

By the end of 2021, Fast hopes to get much larger retailers on board. It also aims to embed checkout within everything from email to blogs.

Business Model & Pricing

The main goal is to make transactions faster, so Fast charges its business partners for that benefit and essentially makes the service free for its consumers. It does not have any secondary business models and there is no supplementary income that it derives from the use of that collected data or the use of those consumers.

A user will never have to pay for using a Fast Checkout or for storing information with Fast. Instead, the online sellers that the user will purchase items from are charged by Fast. The start-up makes its money by charging sellers a small transaction fee to process payments for a transaction. This is a standard rate of 2.9%+29 c of every purchase. This becomes 3.9%+29c for international cards, and +2% if currency conversion is required.

To lower costs for the sellers, Fast performs order batching. This means multiple orders made by the same customer are combined into a single transaction. Any shopper that makes multiple transactions within 5 minutes of each other are also combined into just one transaction.  

Traction

According to the company’s website, Fast Checkout and Fast Login are available to sellers in 30+ countries. Both these solutions support 100+ currencies. To expand its 1-click checkout availability, Fast partners with Headless Checkout Partners to bring the checkout solution to publisher, email, SMS, blog, or in-person.

Fast has gained a lot of traction in the year 2021 alone. According to an article by Techcrunch, by 2021 Fast’s Gross Merchandise Volume processed by its checkout service has “more than tripled each month,” and the trend is expected to continue and in fact increase.

In November 2021, Fast announced a major expansion into the UK in response to extraordinary demand for the company’s unique one-click checkout product. The first ever British seller to partner with Fast is Revolution Beauty, a beauty and personal care business.

In December 2021, Fast partnered with Bloomreach, a commerce experience cloud. This partnership will enable a seamless checkout experience across a brand’s digital marketing channels whereby Fast Login and Checkout will be available for all Bloomreach Engagement customers to embed into emails, text messages, and more.

Founder(s) & Team

Domm Holland: Co-Founder and CEO at Fast. Domm has founded a number of ventures in Australia prior to Fast, serving as CEO for one called Tow. He has worked in multinational companies such as Dell, and has deep cross-functional experience.

Allison Barr Allen: Co-Founder and COO at Fast. She is also a limited partner at Operator Collective. Prior to Fast, Allison was the head of global product operations for Uber’s Money Team.

History and Evolution

Originally in 1999, Amazon filed a patent for the one-click feature, which forced others to either pay a licensing fee or avoid this feature of shopping altogether. However, this patent expired in 2017. In 2019, Fast was founded and quickly capitalized on the feature, raising millions in just 18 months. 

In an interview, co-founder Domm Holland revealed how he came up with the idea of Fast. He states, “I started the company after seeing my wife’s grandmother literally be unable to order groceries online because she forgot her password and just couldn’t get through the checkout process.”

He also revealed that the biggest challenge for the company is of a regulatory nature. As e-commerce is global, Fast is also naturally global. This means that it has to cater to many different kinds of payment laws and privacy laws around the world. So the company has a lot of focus on how it can scale regulatory challenges quickly.

In terms of funding, the company has managed to raise $124.5 Million in a total of 4 funding rounds. In November 2019, a seed round of $2.5 Million was executed. This was followed by a $20 Million Series A round in March 2020, which brought the company’s valuation to $180 Million at the time. A secondary market round was held in April 2020, which was followed by a Series B round of $102 Million in January 2021. 

Additional Learnings

• Several competitors of fast have cropped up since the company started gaining traction. Fast’s outsized Series B came after a number of rival online checkout providers such as Bolt, Rapyd and Checkout raised large rounds.

• Fast never charges the end customer and has a focus on streamlining their customer experience.

• Fast is planning to open an office in London in 2022. With many employees already based out of the UK, the company is hiring recruits from there extensively due to its massive pool of highly educated and e-commerce-savvy candidates.

Market Snapshot

• In 2019, more than 10% of total global purchases occurred online, a figure that’s projected to nearly double in the next decade.

• Cart abandonment is a common problem in ecommerce. Nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned and almost 20% of US online shoppers abandoned an order in the past quarter (2021) specifically due to a long or complicated checkout process.

• Cart abandonment costs ecommerce businesses nearly $4.6T a year in lost revenue.  

Suggested Next Reads

• Domm Holland, Co-Founder and CEO of Fast (The Takeoff, April ‘20)

• Breakout Startup of the Week: Fast will become the king of ecommerce (The Business of Business, September ‘20)

• Checkout platform Fast tackles cart abandonment with this one-two punch (Retail Customer Experience, November ‘21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Accel Club buys brands that have become successful on Amazon and develops them using the technologies and resources of its platform. When shortlisting potential acquisitions, Accel looks for high quality brands with significant growth potential. 

The startup was founded in 2021. It has offices in Europe, US and China. Accel Club has raised a total of $170M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was a Series A raised in November 2021.

On the Web: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview & Products

When buying and scaling businesses that sell on Amazon, Accel Club offers tailored terms and proposals for a smooth acquisition process. Accel  aims to boost growth of e-commerce brands leveraging its technology and tools. The startup’s operations are mainly centred on the US market. However, it plans to expand to European and Asian markets soon.

A business deal is normally closed in 30 days. A deal starts with a short intro call, followed by the signing of an NDA and a deeper inspection of the business. If Accel approves of the business, it proceeds with a letter of intent and due diligence which takes about 2-3 weeks. Finally, all legal papers are signed and funds are disbursed.

Accel Club currently sells about 1,100 items across seven marketplaces. The Amazon brands it buys have around 60% of sales coming from Amazon versus other platforms like eBay.

How It Works

Accel looks for brands that are primarily sold on Amazon FBA, and looks for product categories that are enduring and non-seasonal in nature. The product should be a leader in its respective category, with a high number of reviews and ratings higher than the average. It considers all opportunities but focuses on brands with at least $1M in revenue in the last 12 months.

When Accel Club strikes deals with these Amazon businesses, as part of those deals, sellers stay on as advisors or consultants. They receive two earn-out payments over two years, which is tied to the brand's success. The startup also absorbs teams from sellers, with a trial period between 3-6 months to ensure individuals fit within the existing culture.

Once a business is acquired, the growth process goes through multiple steps. Risks are hedged through a portfolio of products and economies of scale are achieved on the backend of operations. There is a re-focus from current yield to long-term growth, as well as a multichannel boost and geographical expansion. Lastly, the strategic and operational management is enabled by Accel’s high-end technology. 

Business Model & Pricing

Accel Club acquires brands and rolls them into a single business. They aim to grow the businesses they acquire and improve EBITDA by increasing sales through optimizing growth and by aiming to reduce costs by leveraging a shared infrastructure and aiming to bring costs down with scale. As the portfolio of companies grows, it permanently increases the leverage capacity of Accel.

The pay-outs received by acquired businesses are tied to revenue rather than EBITDA. There are no broker fees while valuations are holistic, and payments are arranged in less than 4 weeks. Accel also pays out referral fees – paid to someone who introduces Accel to another worthy seller. It has already paid millions in referral fees.

Traction

After acquiring and scaling e-commerce businesses, Accel Club boasts the following statistics of EV/EBITDA growth:

• >40x for D2C companies 

• 28x for consumer companies

• 15x for FMCG companies

• 3-4x for 3rd party sellers

The startup uses about 100+ useful tools for gathering data, such as Helium10, Keepa, Fakespot and more. Generally, the automated gathering of relevant financial, product and market data ensures fast due diligence and execution. 

Founder(s)

Max Firsov (LinkedIn): Co-Founder and CEO. Max is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in e-commerce. Prior to Accel Club, Max has served as CEO at Yandex Eats. 

Nick Tuzenko (LinkedIn): Co-Founder and Managing Director at Accel Club. Nick has a background in management consulting. He has served as an advisor to the board at Bioloka Holding OU.

History and Evolution

Accel Club was founded in February 2021 and headquartered in Amsterdam. It began as an online startup that buys and integrates Amazon businesses onto its platform and boosts their sales through branding and technology. Co-founders Max and Nick were inspired by US brand Thrasio and decided to take a shot at the ecommerce market in 2021. 

Since its inception in February 2021, the startup has witnessed a very strong growth. In 9 months the company has reached tens of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, while expanding the team to approximately 100 employees. According to the co-founders, they are hoping to invest 10-20 years of their lives in as they want to build a global player.

Additional Learnings

• After the latest round of funding, Accel Club plans to use the cash to invest in automating its processes.

• Deal sourcing is built to process potential targets in days and close deals in weeks. The post acquisition activities increase 3rd party sellers’ business valuations by 5x.

• The difference between an acquired firm’s starting EV and exit EV comes from multiple sources. As a brand is scaled and grown, key factors that come into play include revenue improvements, cost improvements, financing of working capital and multiple arbitrage.

Market Snapshot

• The Amazon ecosystem as of 2021 pulls up $295 Billion from third party sellers’ revenue. It also consists of 62% Amazon GMV, with 30% 10-year CAGR. 

• Of the 3rd party sellers on Amazon, there are roughly 8 million sellers that are registered, 2.1 million that are active and 250k sellers with sales greater than $0.1 million. 3rd party sellers have been the key for Amazon growth and thousands of them are ready to sell their businesses at 3-4x EV/EBITDA.

Suggested Next Reads 

• Accel Club is the latest startup gobbling up Amazon Sellers (Business Insider, November ‘21)

1. Amsterdam-based Accel Club raises €151.45M in equity and debt funding (Silicon Canals, November ’21)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded in 2015, Vuori is headquartered in Encinitas, California, United States. It is an active lifestyle apparel brand that makes premium performance clothing inspired by the coastal California lifestyle – an integration of yoga, surf, sport, art and a strong visionary spirit.

Today Vouri has become best-known for its offering of high-performance activewear that is both “beach and weekend-ready.” The company is a D2C company and also has a healthy wholesale operation, a few physical stores of its own and has raised $445M over 2 rounds of funding to date. In October 2021, Vuori was valued at $4B.

About Vuori: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview & Products

Vuori offers a collection of apparel brands for both men and women. It started by focusing on clothing that could be worn for workouts and outdoor activities, but now it has expanded its categories for outdoor, swim, travel and commute. Some examples of what Vuori sells include shorts, pants, tops, graphic T-shirts, gift cards, hats, and clothing for yoga instructors, surfers, crossfit instructors, personal trainers and individuals.

Its products are offered through dealers in San Diego, Del Mar and Solana Beach in California. More specifically, Vuori currently sells through Nordstrom and REI, and about 500 other specialty dealers across the US.

How It Works

Since the beginning, Vuori’s strategic goals have centered around acquiring new customers, building its brand awareness, and increasing sitewide revenue. It started out using paid social media marketing through apps such as Facebook and Instagram, native advertising, and putting catalogs in the mail to acquire customers. Then in 2016, Vuori partnered with digital marketing agency CPC Strategy to form a holistic marketing plan to optimize its online ad campaigns across multiple selling channels.

Vuori does not compete in the mainstream sectors of basketball and football. Instead, it focuses more towards people participating in slightly less sought activities like yoga, surfing and running. The brand was created keeping in mind there were very few labels offering good yoga gear for men, besides Lululemon.

According to the founder, in making its versatile gear, the fabrics that Vuori uses are 2x-4x the cost of the fabrics used by big active brands on average. The aim is to work with better materials and better construction, resulting in gear that has a more modern and athletic fit. Since Vuori’s direct business is a significant part of its distribution strategy, it is able to absorb the additional cost and not pass it off to its customers. 

Business Model & Pricing

Vuori utilizes both its DTC method, which is the largest part of its channel, as well as specialty dealers to distribute its product. The founder credits the role of the dealers in scaling the brand extremely fast, by merchandising Vuori’s product well, along with following its pricing and promotional agreements.

Vuori’s clothing costs more than the clothing available at an average local sports goods store, as it specifically caters to Californian styles that most other activewear brands lack. Yet the pricing is in line with what one can expect from Lululemon, Rhone, Prana and similar competitors. For example, the company’s clothes sell between $32 for shirts and hats to $188 for its most expensive jacket. So while being reasonable, Vuori has also positioned itself in a premium performance category.

Traction

In the words of the founder Joe Kudla, at the moment Vuori does not need the $400M it just raised for launching its growth strategies. In fact, “most of this money is going to reward early shareholders that believed in the vision from day one.” The funding will also be invested in infrastructure and technology, as well as to grow an executive team via rapid hiring. 

Vuori’s trajectory also remained good during the coronavirus pandemic. The company had about a 100 employees when the pandemic began, but now has 450 and is expected to reach 1,000 in the next three years. This was be validated by Kudla in an interview from August 2021, where he talked about how Vuori thrived during the lockdown because it was essentially selling a product that people could still use indoors. According to him, Vuori had been growing at a 250% compound annual growth rate since its inception, and during the pandemic its fitness sales category tripled instead of the projected doubling of sales. By the end of 2021, the company is on pace to have achieved 140% growth. Furthermore, it is very profitable and does not need external capital for growth at the moment. Kudla also pointed out that in 2022 the company plans on opening about 15 stores, compared to its competitor Lululemon opening 35 to 50 stores in a year. In his words, Kudla does not need this kind of effort to meet its goals.

He shed further light on the future goals of Vuori. Having achieved widespread loyalty from consumers in the US, the brand will begin its international expansion next year. It will launch an omnichannel business in key markets throughout Western Europe and Asia Pacific, and an innovation center in Taiwan. While growing its global distribution, Vuori will double down on retail expansion in the US with more than 100 store openings planned for the next five years.

Founder(s)

Joe Kudla: Founder and CEO of Vuori Inc. Kudla spent some time traveling for his modeling career, which acted as inspiration for Vuori. Kudla then leveraged his unconventional background and personal reasons to launch Vuori in 2015.

History and Evolution

As an athlete who had played a lot of football in his life, Kudla began dealing with a lot of back pain some years before Vuori was launched. It was his decision to take yoga classes when he first realized he did not really know what men were supposed to wear to yoga. This led him to identify a gap in the market where women’s fitness clothing had been the highlight for many brands but men’s clothing had not. At that time Lululemon was a big deal and became wildly popular with women, but the brand treated men’s gear as an afterthought.

This led to the founding of Vuori by Kudla in 2015. For this he raised $2.5M from his family and friends to launch the business out of his garage in 2015. Vuori teamed up with CPC Strategy in April 2016 to improve its Facebook and Google Shopping advertising efforts. The digital marketing agency worked closely with Vuori’s team to establish a holistic marketing plan to optimize their online ad campaigns across multiple selling channels.

Next, the brand was smart in that it instantly started focusing on what customer interests were regarding activewear. Soon Vuori began really resonating with women as well, a lot of whom were buying the brand’s men’s products. So in 2018, Vuori launched its women’s products Side by side. It also placed great emphasis on building its relationships with supply chain partners and factories rather than attempting to scale too quickly.

Today, Vuori’s success is well-known and it has been profitable since 2017, owing to its focus on creating high quality, differentiated products, and building strong relationships with suppliers and customers. In the future, Vuori plans on multiple avenues such as expanding its assortment, accelerating its growth overseas and adding more stores in the US.

Additional Learnings

• Vuori is planning to expand its US store footprint over the next few years. The goal of some stores would be targeting the existing customer base that lives in the area, while other stores will be strategically placed in “active, health-conscious” communities that have not adopted Vuori yet.

• According to Kudla, Vuori executives are looking to Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Asia for international expansion. Japan is a particularly exciting opportunity for Vuori as it now has access to expert knowledge on navigating that market. China is also on the radar with plans to build an e-commerce presence on Tmall next year. Thus, there are plans to open stores in both countries by 2023.

• According to Kudla, the company is not looking at the wholesale business as a means to drive significant revenue growth. So while it is important, wholesale likely will not expand much beyond its current partners. Instead, Vuori will remain committed to building strong relationships with the existing partners.

• Currently, the brand is partnering with organizations such as Climate Neutral and CleanHub to offset its carbon and plastic footprints. It is also taking steps to eliminate 80% of plastics from its shipping and supply chain by 2022.

Market Snapshot

• Before Vuori was established, there were about 7 million men practicing yoga in the US. This number was about 30% of the country’s yoga participants because it is predominantly a female-driven activity. However, male participants were a fast growing demographic.

• At the same time, Kudla researched the surf market and discovered that there were roughly 4 million active participants in the US and around a 100 brands competing for that same customer.

• Two years later in 2017, activewear apparel sales increased 2% to $48B, representing roughly 22% of total apparel industry sales.

• In a market report by PRNewswire posted in September 2021, following highlights were presented:

1. The global athleisure market size is anticipated to reach $549.41B by 2028, registering a CAGR of 8.6% over the forecast period.

2. Through the pandemic, the growing popularity of the utility fashion trend has spurred the demand for utility-active apparel.

3. The yoga apparel segment accounted for the largest revenue share in 2020 and is also estimated to register the fastest CAGR from 2021 to 2028.

4. North America had the largest market share in 2020. However, Asia Pacific is rapidly growing, expecting the fastest CAGR of more than 10% from 2021 to 2028.

Suggested Next Reads 

• How Vuori's Joe Kudla Turned an Idea into an Activewear Empire (Gotham Magazine, January ‘19)

• How Vuori Is Positioning Its Business Strategies During the Pandemic (eMarketer, April ‘20)

• Joe Kudla, Entrepreneur & Founder of Vuori high performance activewear (HDF Magazine, June ‘20) 

• 'The Rise, The Shine' of Vuori: How Vuori's gone from the garage to the fastest growing athletic brand in America (Pixelz, June ‘19)

• Vuori doesn't need the $400M it just raised. How founder Joe Kudla approaches scale, profitably. (RetailDive, November ‘21)

• Vuori Increases Sitewide Revenue Growth 376.43% via Google Shopping & Facebook Advertising (Tinuiti)

These briefs are produced by leveraging publicly available data sources and information. If you notice a mistake or see an area for improvement, please let us know through this typeform or via email (team@sandhill.io).

Snapshot

Founded by Carlos Cashman and Joshua Silberstein in 2018, Thrasio is a digital consumer goods company with headquarters in Walpole, Massachusetts. It acquires Amazon 3rd-party private-label businesses, integrates them onto its proprietary platform, and grows them through its own expertise. The brands become part of Thrasio’s ever-growing portfolio and develop through marketing, product development, supply chain management and wholesale expansion.

As of November 2021, Thrasio has raised $3.4B in capital with the latest Series D round resulting in a valuation of up to $10B. It has acquired more than 200 brands and expanded its workforce to more than 1,000 employees. It has also received several accolades as the best startup to work at, according to 97% of Thrasio employees. To date, the company has acquired about 5 organizations, with its most recent being Lifelong Online on October 4, 2021. The company also has operations in the UK, Germany, China and Japan. 

About Thrasio: Website, LinkedIn

Business Overview & Products

Thrasio's core business is buying other businesses, namely Amazon FBA brands. It buys these brands from 3rd party sellers on Amazon who are looking to exit the platform. Thrasio looks for brands between $1M and $100M revenue. The main criteria include everyday products that are private label. They need to have a steady demand, stable search volumes, and consistent ‘search phrases’ (their names do not change over time). They also need to have a really good standing on Amazon, with at least 500 mostly positive reviews or an average rating of 4 stars.

Thrasio does not go for the following type of goods: ever-changing tech goods, fashion, fads, or anything that carries any kind of founder risk.

How It Works

Thrasio conducts thorough research and looks for the best-selling everyday products on Amazon according to the above criteria. Once it determines that the brand has the potential to grow, it is purchased from small business owners. For owners that are incapable of growing their business at its true potential, Thrasio presents a viable option. It pays these owners upwards of $1M for their business and then grows them as part of its own portfolio.

Once a brand is identified and locked, the acquisition process is straightforward. A deal is drawn up with a signed Letter of Intent, after which Thrasio deep dives into the brand’s financials and explores the seller’s Amazon account. Once this due diligence is completed, Thrasio makes its payment and the seller transfers his assets in a span of 7-14 days. The LOI closes within 30-32 days. The agreement is structured so that earnouts are included for sellers. Such an agreement allows sellers to continue to profit as Thrasio grows their business. Typical earnouts increase the size of the total payout to sellers by an average of 37%.

After the purchase is completed, brands are put through Thrasio’s so-called ‘Conveyor Belt’ – a 500+ checkpoint process used to grow the acquired brands. The Conveyor Belt basically analyzes and integrates the newly acquired brand into Thrasio’s portfolio. It consists of a core team of employees who work through a 500+ point checklist of best practices in an average of 34 days. Tasks are then assigned to relevant specialists in the supply chain, marketing and other departments as needed. This process ensures that as Thrasio takes over a new brand, all the processes going forward are optimized. 

Business Model & Pricing

Thrasio has been profitable since its inception in 2018. The model it follows is an acquisition entrepreneurship template, where the startup acquires Amazon sellers’ businesses and scales them up. It also follows a multi-brand and multi-product strategy.    

The company determines the value of a brand under consideration through the following process:

• Start with the seller's last 12 months carried profits and add back the seller's salary to get the seller's discretionary earnings.

• On that number, a multiple is agreed upon (usually a 2-4 valuation multiplier), determining the price Thrasio would pay its sellers.

As Web Retailer further highlights, “Current purchase prices for Amazon FBA businesses are typically at 2x-4x of the last twelve month’s EBITDA. Thrasio is currently behind nearly 40% of these transactions in the US. The ultimate selling price depends on business size, IP rights, market size, growth opportunity, and the 3 Rs (reviews, ratings, and rank).”

Traction

In less than 4 years, Thrasio has completed more than 150 acquisitions, raised more than $3.4B in capital and grown to more than 1000 employees. It was reported to be managing around 14,000 products. Thrasio’s latest funding round of $1B will facilitate itself to buy more companies as well as to expand internationally. It is currently on a rate of buying 1.5 businesses per week.

An article sponsored by Thrasio highlights that while the startup is currently focused on its success within the Amazon platform, it is looking to expand to other marketplaces and retail distribution. It also has goals to build bigger economies of scale, in some cases even developing technologies to replace some of Amazon’s components. According to TechCrunch, these include “sourcing for products, analytics both to source the more interesting companies to buy up as well as to market those products once under the Thrasio wing, even its own fulfillment technology.” 

Companies acquired by Thrasio typically see a 156% increase in profitability. Its business model has received considerable applause from the startup community. The success has meant that many startups around the world have cropped up building businesses by replicating Thrasio’s model. The model is especially gaining traction in India.

In 2020, Thrasio logged $500M in revenues with a profit of $100M, and was valued at $3B in February 2021.

Founder(s)

Carlos Cashman: Founder and Co-CEO of Thrasio. As an experienced entrepreneur, investor, and manager, Carlos has started 15 companies in his life, and been a part of several more startups, venture-backed and non-venture backed.

Joshua Silberstein: Founder and Co-CEO of Thrasio. Joshua Silberstein is a seasoned operator and entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience successfully building companies – as a founder, investor, board member, and CEO. 

History and Evolution

Thrasio was founded in 2018 by Joshua Silberstein and Carlos Cashman. The name Thrasio was derived from an Amazon warrior in Greek Mythology named "Thraso" which translates to "confidence."   

The company came into existence because the founders identified an untapped opportunity. Traditionally, the exit routes available to small business owners at Amazon have only been passingly lucrative. An owner looking to sell their business could sell them directly to an individual who would fund the purchase with a loan or personal financing. This method did not involve in-cash transactions and contained the risk of a buyer pulling out. The other method was to list the business with a broker, who would facilitate the sale with a buyer and take a percentage cut. This method had the downside of unreasonably high commissions charged by brokers.   

However, with the establishment of Thrasio, the founders presented a new kind of model which keeps the sellers content by providing them with a fair, fast, and profitable exit strategy. The process of acquisition is very transparent and expresses all expectations from the startup. The terms of the deal are well-perceived by sellers because Thrasio pays well and even shares post-sale gains through their earnout arrangements. According to the founders, this is in fact the company’s very secret to success and core value – the relationships they build with their sellers. The other value they highlight is the synergies they build with their own teams. 

Since its inception, Thrasio has gone through the following stages:

• It was founded in 2018.

• In April 2019, Thrasio obtained $6.5M in seed funding and in December, it raised $20M in Series A funding. A few months later, it raised $75M in Series B funding. 

• In July 2020, Thrasio reached $1B in valuation after raising $260M in a Series C funding round. In November, former Amazon executive Tom Szkutak joined Thrasio's Board of Directors. He was Amazon's Chief Financial Officer for over 13 years (2002 to 2015).

• In Jan 2021, $500M  was raised in debt financing. In February, $750M  was raised in a Series C round. Another Series C round in April brought $100M. In September, a debt financing round brought $650M. In October, $1B was raised in a Series D funding round which brought the company’s valuation up to $10B. Finally in November, a secondary market round ensued which raised $6.5M.

• In December 2021, CEO Carlos announced company rebranding and site redesign, along with a new vision for the future of consumer goods and retail.

  

Additional Learnings

• By April 2020, Thrasio’s valuation had increased 32 times compared to its seed round valuation in April 2019. Since 2018, its gross revenue has surged from $0 to over $200M. 

• SalesTech indicates that Thrasio has been selected as the #1 Best Small and Medium Workplaces in Retail in November 2021. According to 97% of Thrasio employees, working at the global startup is a great experience. 

• Thrasio has to-date made 3 investments, namely in Zeenk (as a lead investor), Dwarfs and Yardline. 

Market Snapshot

• According to Forbes, third-party sellers on Amazon are mostly small and medium-size businesses. They generated roughly 60% of Amazon’s product sales in 2019. Other interesting facts highlighted in this article include:

1. There are over 2 million third-party sellers worldwide.

2. In the US alone, these businesses sold $3.4B items via Amazon in the span of 12 months (ending in May 2020).

3. Over 30,000 of these sellers in the US each generate at least $1M in sales a year, relying on Amazon for logistics

Suggested Next Reads 

• How To Make Millions for Bezos’ Billions (Forbes, November ‘20)

• Thrasio SuccessStory (SuccessStory)

• Thras.io Business Model in A Nutshell (FourWeekMBA)

• Meet The World’s Largest Buyer Amazon FBA Business (Web Retailer)

• Fortune and Great Place to Work Name Thrasio the #1 Best Workplace in Retail (Sales Tech Series, November ‘21)

• Thrasio, the Amazon aggregator, raises $1B in fresh funding at a valuation of up to $10 billion (TechCrunch, October ‘21)