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Little Black Bag, a fashion e-commerce site, and Pose, a style-sharing app that falls somewhere in between Instagram and Lookbook, announced yesterday that they are merging to give their users one unified product by early 2014, PandoDaily reports.
The fashion companies are a perfectly coordinated match: Little Black Bag CEO Dan Murillo said he is looking to make the site more mobile-friendly because its mobile traffic has increased 300 percent this year - and Pose already has mobile in the bag (pun intended).
“Our biggest priority for the next phase of our growth is to address mobile,” Murillo said. “Pose is already one of the best in this area, in terms of its shop-able mobile media experience and its cachet as the place that fashion industry insiders go to share content.”
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So how did these two LA fashion startups meet up? They share Upfront Ventures as their supporter. Little Black Bag’s last round in August put its total amount raised at $10.8 million since 2012 and Pose has raised $4.3 million since starting up in 2010.
“Both teams were so complementary in their visions that we said, ‘You really ought to talk,’” Upfront Ventures partner Mark Suster said. “The best thing about it is they both have plenty of cash left – millions.”
With a security blanket of “millions,” Murillo will take the helm as CEO of the new unnamed company and Pose CEO Dustin Rosen will be Chief Strategy Officer for the new 30- to 40-person team. Together, the team will give Pose’s 2 million users and Little Black Bag’s 1 million a “content plus commerce” mobile fashion experience.
Pose’s team will continue to focus on content, aka user-uploaded photos of fashionable finds, while the Little Black Bag team will work on providing the e-commerce experience. Little Black Bag’s current model allows users to pick one item from its catalog, matches them up with two accompanying items and then allows users to swap those items with others before finally checking out; but it is unclear if this model will be used by the new company in 2014.
The two teams’ complementary skillsets will hopefully position the new company to do it all: provide one mobile shopping app where users also can find and share fashion inspiration.
“I’m delighted to have two strong teams working together from a position of strength, rather than the alternative which would have been to have them do it separately from a position of weakness two years from now,” Suster said.
