If you know exactly what you’re looking for on the Internet, Amazon and Zappos are great, but what if you just want to browse through beautiful objects at your leisure?
Svpply (pronounced “supply”) is a new website, to fulfill the lack of a decent online “window shopping experience.” To get started on Svpply, search for apparel, accessories, shoes, tech, media, home stuff and sort by gender and price. Once you see stuff you like, add it to your list, and maybe follow whomever posted it. On Svpply, all of the content is uploaded by users, which you can add through an easy to use bookmark. On the site, you can follow both individuals and stores. In addition, Svpply provides sections for Editor’s pick, Gift guides and Popular this week for your browsing pleasure.
Like an item a lot? You can email it to a friend or share it on Twitter and Facebook. You can also browse other posted items by the user as it’s likely you have similar taste (think Hunch). Click buy and the site takes you to the retailer’s website. It is minimal shopping at its finest. Just in time to start building my Christmas list!
The format is very Tumblresque. In addition to the ability to follow users, as I sit on the page, a new item is loaded much like in my Tumblr dashboard. Svpply is part of a new crop of chronologically stream based web products. The service also reminds us of The Fancy, but with a niche focus on browsing high end design as opposed to meta-tagging the whole world.
“Our background is more engrossed in the aesthetic. One of our goals is to have a shopping site guys won’t be afraid of. On the front page, you dont even know you are being sold to,” says Ben Pieratt, Svpply’s CEO, who has twice been named one of our nation’s Top 20 Designers Under 30.
CTO Eric Jacobsen is Svpply’s developer and Zach Klein, their Chairman is a co-founder at Connected Ventures who is currently the Head of Product at Boxee. “We’re not making any money right now,” says Pieratt, “Right now we’re concentrating on building the experience for users.” But stores on Svpply are asking about analytics and this info will be valuable. In addition, once they reach a certain scale, charging a 3% fee at check out is a feasible way to make money. In the past month the site has had 130,000 unique visitors and they are launching their own API soon.
Yesterday, Svpply raised $500,000 from SparkCapital in a series A round from the Founder’s Collective and a handful of great angels including Joshua Kushner, Ron Conway/SV Angels, Adam Pritzker, Jason Hirschhorn and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley.
Svpply is looking good.
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