With $1.26 million in funding, Sortd’s founders want to shake up social shopping and influencer marketing
SmartCompany spoke to Sortd co-founders Jodine Wolman and Alexis Aaron after their fashion browsing app secured $1.26 million.
Co-founded by Jodine Wolman and Alexis Aaron, Sortd gives users a single portal to save and compare items they’ve browsed while online shopping, cutting the need for multiple tabs.
This week, Sortd secured $1.26 million in investment funding from a mixture of private investors, including Darryl Garber of ELMO Software, and through venture capital firm Antler.
The app idea started over a conversation between the two lifelong friends.
“Jodine was at my house one day, and I had 100 tabs open on my computer; she said that was ridiculous, and I said, ‘well, help me figure it out a way to solve it’,” recalled Aaron.
In the two years since, the pair bootstrapped the product, built proofs of concept and tested the market.
“Alexis and Jodine have a clear vision to transform the way we shop online, removing the friction of transacting with multiple online retailers and improving customer experience,” said Cath Rogers, partner at Antler Australia.
Aaron and Wolman are excited to grow their product team and marketing capabilities after the raise, but the ambitions don’t stop there.
“We really see this raise as being that the mechanism that can help us grow and propel us into the next stages of our business, the things we’ve been working towards for two years are now within reach,” said Wolman.
Brand partnerships
Sortd already operates through the affiliate marketing programs of brands like The Iconic, Farfetch and Cotton:On, and hopes to start having more direct conversations with retailers soon.
Wolman explained how, with its new funding and resources, Sortd will be able to go to brands and say “X number of users have saved items from your brand and x numbers of users have bought items from your brand; we think that our users and people purchasing from your brand are really enjoying this kind of service. Would you like to partner with us on a more structured level?’”
“Affiliate relationships are essentially the conduit to retail partnerships,” said Aaron.
One stop shop
The pair have grand plans to turn Sortd into an all-in-one solution for browsing and shopping online. “A universal platform where people can go through the entire shopping process in one go,” Aaron said.
“We know people are shopping on their mobiles, they’re shopping on their desktops, they’re also shopping in person and so, our vision is to be able to bring in that entire experience into one browser where they can browse, decide, buy, return, exchange, track and share.”
Flipping influencer marketing on its head
Sortd already has a social element, allowing users to share items on their list with their friends and help each other decide what to buy. The next step is thinking about influencer marketing.
“Influencers, they’re posting what they’ve already bought and worn and then their followers can go and then buy that,” said Aaron. She went on to explain Sortd’s ambition to gather data from shoppers’ lists, which would then be made available to brands and influencers.
“We want to go a level up from that whereby our users can get insight into what people are thinking about buying and where they’re shopping and, can follow through our app someone with a similar size to you, or a similar style to you and get insight into what they’re thinking of buying before they buy it.”
“Essentially we’re flipping influencer marketing on its head,” Wolman said. “Influencer marketing’s very retrospective and we want to gain insight into those initial phases.”
