[ibimage==29621==Original==none==self==null]CEO Jaclyn Shanfeld
It’s been a good week for Shop Hers. The company just moved into new offices, is celebrating its one-year anniversary and this last Friday just closed a $3.5 million funding round led by venture capital firm Floodgate.
“Everything feels like it has been put in warp speed because growth has been so fast,” said CEO and Co-founder Jaclyn Shanfeld. Early on “we started to realize very quickly that we had something special.”
Shop Hers is an e-consignment store. Part of a growing movement of online consignment shops, the company has set itself apart from the pack by a die-hard dedication to its users. While other e-commerce platforms have taken consignment and simply thrown it online, Shop Hers has carefully curated a social shopping experience.
Most important to the company’s success is its ‘Style Soulmate’ feature. Using a unique and patent pending algorithm users are matched based on shared dimensions and brand preferences. This makes the experience much more social, like trading clothes between friends, and less like a used clothing transaction. The company also has a ‘Flaunt It’ section- a virtual closet where women can display the clothes they love. If they ever choose to sell a flaunted item, it can be simply flipped into the ‘Sell’ section of ‘My Closet.’
Prices on Shop Hers are usually around 50 percent of retail but the seller is ultimately in control of the price. Shop Hers takes just 18 percent of any sale from user-generated sales and 35 percent of any sale from their VIP section. VIP customers can send in clothes and the company will photograph and upload items on their behalf.
This experience differs wildly from the typical world of consignment. “I still remember dropping off a box on Wilshire and barely getting enough for lunch,” said Shanfeld. “Selling something and receiving next-to-nothing in exchange is so frustrating for so many women.”
At Shop Hers “they find customer service that people would not expect from a 2nd hand market,” said Shanfeld. Talk to Shanfeld and she will repeat over and over again their dedication is to a “frictionless process to buy and sell.”
“Consignment is a dirty word in our office,” said Shanfeld. “To us it is a concept of the past.” To ensure a great experience Shop Hers has every item sold on the website sent to their Santa Monica headquarters where they personally vet authenticity and quality. The company also narrowly focuses itself on designer brands. There is a select list of what can be bought and sold on Shop Hers.
To perfect the website user experience the Shop Hers team has spent most of the last year locked in a cubicle space at the Yahoo Center in Santa Monica. The company has spent little time on tradition marketing, and they don’t need to.
That focus on perfection has driven a surge of organic interest. So engaged and ready to make suggestions is the user community that the website ended up being “home grown, home spun and dictated by our users,” said Shanfeld.
After getting many requests for international expansion, Shop Hers opened up shipping to 194 countries. The next month sales doubled.
This engagement with users is dictating future features as well. “So many women write into customer service saying ‘if you every see ‘x’ item please tell me.’” Shop Hers took that input and now is building a wish list feature.
Shop Hers high user engagement has come with little marketing. The product has spread mainly by word of mouth and savvy use of Pinterest. Co-founder Jenna Stahl “saw a lot of cohesion between the brands” and so Shop Hers receives a “massive amount of traffic from Pinterest,” said Shanfeld.
To build on that success, Shop Hers plans to hire a marketing director soon. Though right now they don’t see much of an advantage from a classic marketing strategy. The new director of marketing’s responsibilities will be mostly to build on the social buzz already surrounding the company, said Shanfeld.
As Shop Hers continues to grow they will be rolling out an iPhone app soon, as well as a price suggestion algorithm built on all the pricing and brand preference data they have collected.
Given the trajectory of the company and their user dedication, expect Shop Hers to have a big presence in e-commerce soon.
[ibimage==29620==Original==http://shop-hers.com/==self==ibimage_align-left]
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