With $5 Million in Funding, Olapic Targets Fashion Retail Market

What's This?

By Lauren Indvik2013-07-30 11:11:34 UTC

Olapic has come a long way since it raised $1 million in seed funding a year ago. The company's flagship product, a platform that allows companies to collect ("crowdsource") images and videos from social networks to display on their websites, has been adopted by major media brands and, increasingly, by fashion retailers. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Fung Capital and Longworth Venture Partners to help further its expansion into the retail space.

In a phone interview last week, co-founder and CEO Pau Sabria said that when Olapic started out, it sought to provide media organizations (including this one) with tools to collect reader images and videos, which they could use to further their storytelling. Working with media companies "provided a lot of exposure," he said, and retailers reached out to see if Olapic could build something for them.

"The opportunity for ecommerce is much bigger, and the value for customers is much greater, so we've decided to shift our sales efforts [accordingly], though we still work with a few select media companies," Sabria says.

How It Works

Every day, consumers use their smartphones to capture photos of their outfits or a new purchase, often sharing those images with friends, or even publicly, on networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Apparel and retail companies, recognizing that organic behavior, have begun to try to direct it, encouraging customers to upload and tag photos of themselves with their products. Michael Kors, for example, uses the hashtag #WhatsInYourKors to encourage women to show their handbags and what's inside them.

It's great to have all those points of promotion scattered across the web and various mobile and social networks, but they can do more — and it's that "more" that Olapic is doing for its clients. The company has created tools that let marketers aggregate, organize, display and analyze all of these images, which they can use for an monthly fee priced according to their company's size.

Publicly, that can be as simple as creating a page that shows photos of people wearing a company's product. It can also be more fine-tuned: Both Free People and Nasty Gal (pictured above) show photos of customers wearing individual products on their product pages, and Free People even includes tags with its merchandise to encourage customers to upload photos of products with the right hashtags. (It should be noted that Free People no longer works with Olapic, but has replicated its technology in-house.)

Does It Sell?

To some, adding user-generated content to product pages may seem superfluous, but Olapic says — and I've been able to confirm with one of their clients that this is true — that integrating its platform onto product pages significantly increases time spent on those pages, and even boosts conversion rates by as much as 5%. This is, I suspect, because these photos allow shoppers to see products worn a variety of different ways, on a variety of body types, not just a model's.

Sabria thinks the product will also be able to help retailers reduce returns because shoppers will "have that much more information at the point of purchase… and be less [surprised] when they actually see the product."

While the conversion data alone is appealing, marketers are also able to see, en masse, how customers style and feel about their purchases, and what they look like wearing them.

Beyond the clients mentioned above, Olapic also works with Lancome, Guess, Steve Madden, Design Within Reach, Coach and New Balance, among other retailers.

Sabria says the company will use the funding to improve all of its products, especially its analytics tool, and to hire more across its strategy, marketing, product management, engineering and client service teams.

Image: Getty Images and Nasty Gal

Topics: Business, Fashion, free people, Marketing, nastygal, Olapic, retail, Startups