Grand St., a curated Woot-esque service for ‘creative technology’, raises $1.3 million

Today Grand St. announced that it has raised a $1.3 million round of seed funding, led by First Round Capital. Also participating in the financing are a bloc of investors and entrepreneurs you know by name: Gary Vaynerchuk, betaworks, David Tisch, among others.

Grand St., a service that remains in controlled beta, sells what it describes as ‘creative technology.’ In practice this means the company has a list of selected products on its website that are on sale for a certain period of time, roughly a week according to TNW’s use of the site, that it has tested and found appealing.

The simple parallel is Woot, a service that also focuses on the vending of a small number of goods at a time. Grand St., however, wishes to be more genre selective.

Its value proposition is twofold: it finds and tests products, curating a list of items that it thinks that you will like; if it is bad at this task, the company will struggle. However, if it can successfully ferret out a constant flow of neat consumer-facing electronics – every item currently listed on its homepage is a consumer electronic – it could become the best place to find out what is new, and next.

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Second, it promises a positive shopping experience. The company doesn’t drop ship goods, something that can lead to uneven customer satisfaction, instead opting to operate its own warehouse.

A question unanswered: Is there enough neat stuff out there to keep Grand St. fresh? It’s known that there is rising innovation in the hardware space; such goods will be the lifeblood of Grand St.

Here’s a shot of the site in action:

Fans of technology products are more than willing to buy more, and more often, in my view, if properly pitched. Grand St. does a good job of just that: each product page is a granular explanation as to why the company picked the good.

Thus far, Grand St. is an attractive service. Its ability to maintain quality integrity in terms of the products it chooses to vend will be the hurdle it must clear weekly, for life.

Top Image Credit: Luz Bratcher