Online fashion retailer Frank & Oak raises $5 million in Series A funding round led by Lightbank

Personalized online fashion retailer Frank & Oak has announced the closure of a Series A funding round worth $5 million today.

The new batch of equity financing was led by Lightbank, a venture capital firm setup by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the co-founders of the popular deal-of-the-day website Groupon. However, the round also included participation from BDMI and Rho Ventures Canada, with some follow-on investment from Real Ventures.

Montreal-based Frank & Oak is a clothing website tailored specifically for men. One look at the store’s homepage and it’s easy to get a feel for the ‘smart but casual’ fashion ranges that are proving popular at the moment with aspiring young businessmen.

Ethan Song and Hicham Ratnani started the firm in February of this year, with the goal to “make shopping easy for men”. The company says the Series A funding will be used to “deepen” the personalized shopping experience that it currently offers online by expanding its range of clothing and lifestyle products. It will also hire new staff with some of the investment.

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Commenting on the funding round, Song said:

“Men want to look great, but they also want it to be easy and accessible, so we created Frank & Oak to solve both problems and turn the way guys shop on its head.

This funding will enable us to broaden our offering and expand our reach. We aim to do more than just build a successful business—we are redefining the way men shop for clothes by providing targeted content and personalized recommendations.”

Chicago-based Lightbank is an investment firm focused on early-stage technology companies. Vicki Levine, a Principal at the firm, will join the board of directors at Frank & Oak, which already includes Real Ventures general partner Mark Macleod and the firm’s co-founders Song and Ratnani.

“With a menswear market of $112 billion in North America and an increasing shift from traditional retail to vertically-integrated e-commerce, Frank & Oak is well-positioned to change the shopping paradigm for the next generation of male shoppers,” Levine said.

Frank & Oak wants to try and build a community, as well as a sense of brand loyalty, through a monthly batch of editorial (Song refers to it as a ‘digital magazine’) for its users. You can get a feel for what it looks in the video below, which was created as a sort of visual catalogue for “The Industry Issue”.

Song told the Next Web: “Right now we’re both growing the technology and the user experience team, as well as our content team to basically create a truly personalized, but also intelligent shopping experience.”