Brandfield.com is the freshly new social shopping community for people who live in the Netherlands. Govert van Eerde, former founder of email marketing company TAPPS and now co-founder of Brandfield describes it like this:
“Brandfield is an invitation-only exclusive online outlet. featuring high-end brands at prices that are discounted between 30 and 70%. It offers outlet sales during a 2 to 3-day window, alerting members of sales via email.”
Brandfield covers many product categories, like Home & Outdoor Living, Cosmetics & Toiletries, Electronics & Fun, Travel & Events and Fashion Accessories.
Social Shopping communities are hot
Brandfield enters a crowded market. Probably the most well know example is Vente-Privee.com, which had a turnover of 510 million euros in 2008 and is distributing 55.000 packages per day. Vente-Privee is active in France, Germany, UK, Italy and Spain. Other examples are the Russian KupiVIP, the German Brands4Friends, who both are backed by Mangrove Capital Partners and the Dutch ShopVIP. So there are plenty of good deals to get.
Brandfield is aiming to get their users via media partnerships with publishers, their first exlclusive media partnership deal is closed with Hachette Filipacchi Media.
Invites for The Next Web readers
As Brandfield is invite only we TheNextWeb managed to get 100 invites. Sign up at Brandfield with reference code: thenextweb and you’re in.
I’m getting my hands on the upcoming sale of the LG flatscreen TV.
I am a Dutchie and registered myself, so thanks for the opportunity…
But what’s new on the horizon compared to it’s competitors like Ibood.com/1dayfly.nl? Which are also open to the public and get fresh updates every 24h?
So, what is so social about this online shop? I don’t think being able to reply to a product is a social thing..
@bram ibood and 1dayfly are open to the public. Vente-Privee and Brandfield are closed and offer products only to their community. This way producers and manufactures can sell stuff to a certain group at a discount without the rest of the world knowing what that price is.
@jasper hmmm that is a good question. Lets ask the founders.
This field is called social shopping, probably because everybody buys the same products. This is a different social than we are used to (like in social networks)
It looks a bit like the old 1999 model of letsbuyit.com (that miserably failed).
@Bram, Jasper and Patrick
Thank you all for responding to the Brandfield.com article of last week. I am one of the founders of Brandfield.com and I am happy to answer some of the questions.
@Bram
Indeed the two (very succesful) companies you mentioned operate some way in the same field as we will do. But as Patrick mentioned one of the key differences is that Brandfield.com is a closed community. Not everybody is able to buy products, first of all you need to be a registrerd Exclusive Member. We invite members directly ourselves, and as the article mentioned we work closely together with Hachette Filipacchi Media (names of more publishers will be released shortly).
And it is not automaticilay that for example after eight days or two weeks you become an Exclusive Member of Brandfield.com after being listed at the waitinglist.
The second difference with the two mentioned companies is our broad product offering. We only sell high-end (in and outdoor) design, cosmetics, furniture, fashion accessoires, tickets for events, VIP arrangements and stays in 5 star hotels with discounts up to 70 %. This combination of broad product offering does makes us unique I think.
@Jasper
Jasper, the choise of using the word ‘social shopping’ could be discribed as an “editorial freedom”. It was Patrick to choose this word, it is not mentioned in our press releases. However, now he mentioned it, in the near future we do launch some ‘social features’. For example, it will be our Exclusive Members to give access to members on our waitinglist and it will be also our Exclusive Members to ‘decide’ or advice which products we will offer. Last but not least, a special forum will be launched to evaluate products. Not new and not unique, but in whole it gives you an idea of what we will introduce in the coming months.
But the biggest ‘social’ event we will launch I must keep as a secret. By the end of September you will all know what I mean!:-)
Best,
Govert van Eerde