BloomNation heads for New York as it expands to become the Etsy for flowers
Imagine you’re an ecommerce manager by day but a poker whizz-kid by night; the chances are that if you won an event at the World Series of Poker, flowers wouldn’t be the first thing on your mind. But they were on poker aficionado David Daneshgar’s mind when he won a WSP even in 2008. Maybe our daydreaming e‑commerce manager might wish to think again: Daneshgar and his two buddies, Farbod Shoraka and Gregg Weisstein, used the $27,000 winnings to launch a new online florist marketplace. A blossoming marketplace Born in 2011, BloomNation is on course to grow into the Etsy of the flower industry and is embarking this month on an ambitious new expansion. New York City is amongst the new locations the LA-based company is recruiting local artisan florists, while others include Washington, D.C., Boston and Philadelphia (it’s already had successful launches in Las Vegas and Chicago). Perspicuous e‑commerce analysts will be aware that local artisans have energized online food and craft markets recently. Daneshgar, Shoraka and Weisstein (who met at college) are tapping their talents for the flower-sending market. And they’re succeeding: BloomNation won the University of Chicago School of Business’ New Venture Challenge in 2012 and it…
The rise and rise of gourmet cook-at-home meal-kit subscription service Blue Apron
Busy e‑commerce managers, like everyone after hard day’s work, need to eat when they arrive home quaking with hunger. However, deciding what to cook can be a drag, especially if you need to go back out to the grocery store to fetch that all-important garam masala or turmeric. New York e‑commerce startup Blue Apron is taking the strain out of home cooking for busy professionals with its subscription delivery service of mouthwatering meal kits that top chefs would approve of. Every e‑commerce manager’s dream According to Fortune, the startup, which launched in 2012, is about to close a Series C round estimated to be between $40million and $50million, and a $500million valuation. It’s got some competition, to be sure (New York neighbor Plated being one), but it seems to be getting a lot right. While some rivals, like Los Angeles-based PopUp Pantry, have gone to the wall, Blue Apron is going from strength to strength. At the end of March, it announced it was serving half a million meals per month – way up from the 100,000 per month it was delivering in August last year. At $10 per meal, that translates into a revenue run rate of $60 million.…
Mobile payment startup Square brings a virtual currency world closer with new partnership with Coinbase
A sci-fi world where we all carry virtual currency in preference to the ‘real’ stuff has come a step closer, thanks to a new partnership between the increasingly popular mobile payment provider Square and Bitcoin wallet Coinbase. It doesn’t take a seasoned product manager to recognize that this is a potentially big development for the future of the cryptocurrency. Simple and painless for buyer and seller alike All goods and services on the startup’s online storefront, Square Marketplace, will now be available to buy with Bitcoin as well as with traditional bank or credit cards (the Marketplace in a kind of virtual one-stop-shop featuring items from ecommerce merchants who are actually geographically scattered across the world). The more skeptical product manager may be speculating whether this is just a shameless attempt to ride the Bitcoin hype wave; but he or she would be wrong. Square’s market lead, Ajit Varma, explains in the company blog announcing the move that sellers won’t notice anything different (apart perhaps from better sales) and buyers will find it simple and painless, thanks to the adroit technological processing Square has put in place. Buyers simply scan the QR code in their Bitcoin wallets to load the…
Birchbox follows Warby Parker, Bonobos, with new bricks-and-mortar store alongside its ecommerce site
Most savvy ecommerce analysts are aware that ecommerce has been undergoing a makeover of late: the way to go, after establishing an online presence, appears to be combining web-based ecommerce stores with the bricks-and-mortar variety. And New York-based subscription beauty product startup Birchbox has just decided to take that particular bull by the horns as it turns four years of age. As reported in the New York Times, a new permanent retail store is moving out of the planning stage and is due to open on West Broadway in Manhattan’s SoHo shopping district very shortly (probably May). Growth potential Co-founders Katia Beauchamp (31) and Hayley Barna (30), who became friends and founded Birchbox while students at Harvard Business School, say the new initiative has less to do with in-store revenues than with the growth potential a bricks-and-mortar store can offer. As Ms. Beauchamp puts it: “We are not focused on profitability, we are focused on hypergrowth. We like the idea of building a store along with the business.” The perspicuous ecommerce analyst will recognize that Birchbox is following a lengthening line of successful ecommerce startups which, having enjoyed connecting with real life customers via pop-up shops, decided to acquire permanent…
Can New York ecommerce startup Grand St do for indie hardware designers what Etsy did for indie crafters?
Even a novice ecommerce analyst would concur that if an ecommerce startup manages to achieve a repeat-buyer rate of 40 percent and crosses the $1 million mark in revenues after just six months of trading, it’s onto a pretty hot business idea. And this is precisely what Grand St., the New York startup aiming to become the Etsy of electronics, has done. Etsy for electronics Co-founder Amanda Peyton realized that there are tens of thousands of hardware startups in existence, creating seriously snazzy consumer gadgets that you simply won’t find in stores. Things like “Everpurse”, a bag that doubles as a smartphone recharger, or modular robotic kits, or “smart” dog collars. The list goes on. After curating a small daily selection of goods since its launch last July, the startup decided last month to expand its ecommerce store into a larger marketplace for indie hardware designers. Aptly named “Marketplace”, the new initiative has a number of key features which seasoned ecommerce analysts will recognize have real potential to make it the electronics version of Etsy. Firms with products ready for purchase can list them on Grand St, which takes an 8 percent cut of the sales. But Marketplace will also…
