Olapic, the e‑com­merce-focused pho­to-shar­ing start­up based in New York, recent­ly took a major step for­ward in expand­ing aware­ness about its unique approach to e‑commerce mar­ket­ing after secur­ing a Series A round amount­ing to $5 mil­lion. But e‑commerce ana­lysts and oth­er pro­fes­sion­als work­ing in e‑commerce media jobs are prob­a­bly won­der­ing what exact­ly is so unique about the platform?

User-gen­er­at­ed e‑marketing

Co-found­ed in 2011 by three Span­ish émi­grés who met as stu­dents at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty (Pau Sabria, Luis Sanz and Jose de Cabo), Olapic lets vis­i­tors use a sim­ple upload tool to con­tribute their own images. The uploader is able to access local­ly stored images or those post­ed on social net­works like Insta­gram and Twit­ter. But this, e‑commerce ana­lysts might agree, is where the clever stuff starts: pub­lish­ers, agen­cies and e‑retailers can use those pho­tos to pro­mote their brands on their own websites.

Olapic works chiefly with e‑retailers, scour­ing the Net on their behalf for brand or prod­uct relat­ed key­words and hash­tags. Once Olapic has crowd­sourced the rel­e­vant user-gen­er­at­ed images, the brand can choose the ones that most favor­ably reflect the prod­uct and dis­play them in an online gallery or prod­uct page. Brands have total con­trol over the pho­tos used on their web­sites and Olapic lets them see user sub­mis­sions in real time. It also enables them to stay con­nect­ed to the users who made the sub­mis­sions, a fea­ture which Pau Sabria reck­ons increas­es conversions.

Suc­cess beck­ons for Olapic’s pio­neer­ing approach 

Last year, the start­up start­ed to diver­si­fy its client base by tap­ping into pub­lish­er brands like NY Dai­ly News and Conde Nast. But it’s recent­ly placed more empha­sis on part­ner­ing with e‑retailers. As any sea­soned e‑commerce ana­lyst can tell, user-gen­er­at­ed images can func­tion very effec­tive­ly as visu­al prod­uct reviews.

Sabria explained, “Cus­tomer-inspired e‑commerce is a mar­ket we are pio­neer­ing. We will use the fund­ing to invest a sig­nif­i­cant effort into cre­at­ing aware­ness for this type of mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce experience.”

The start­up now has brag­ging rights to around 20 live brands, includ­ing major e‑commerce names like Coach, Jet Blue, Lul­ule­mon, Nasty Gal, New Bal­ance and Threadless.

The lat­est fund­ing round was led by Long­worth Ven­ture Part­ners and Fung Cap­i­tal USA, with exist­ing investors Scout Ven­tures and Great Oaks also par­tic­i­pat­ing. The addi­tion­al funds will be deployed in mar­ket­ing invest­ment and in hir­ing more sales staff.