For rich shoppers — really rich people who really love to shop — shopping sprees are something different. They don’t buy a handful of pieces once or twice a year to treat themselves, they drop six figures on any given order, sometimes spending upward of $1 million a year on clothing, jewelry, and accessories.
In fact, the top 2% of shoppers can make up 40% of a retailer’s sales, Lupe Puerta told Business Insider, citing numbers from luxury e-commerce platform Net-a-Porter, where she ran personal and VIP shopping.
Applied to the entire market, that means top shoppers are responsible for billions in spending a year, given that the personal luxury goods market hit an estimated $400 billion last year, according to research from Bain.
And these clients don’t do it all on their own. Many have personal shoppers, people whose job it is to pull the best purses to take to brunch or jackets to wear on vacation in the Hamptons.
After 15 years of running the personal shopping department at Net-a-Porter, Puerta founded The Floorr — named after the shop floor, which the app is supposed to recreate — to digitize and streamline the process.
“People use WhatsApp, iMessage, email; it’s so segmented the way they work,” Puerta said about personal shoppers, adding that they often deliver suggested looks to clients through PDFs or untrackable links.
“You think about how much power they have” — top personal shoppers can sell up to $5 million a year — “but they have no tools,” she said.
Not only does this segmentation create a mess for clients, it meant that personal shoppers could lose out on commissions.
On The Floorr, which launched in January, links are tracked — whether it’s the client buying or their friend — so the shopper always gets a percentage of the sale, as tracked on live-updating dashboards. Outfits are stylized on mood boards and over video styling sessions, presenting the client with a much more cohesive platform to view items. Along the way, the app collects data — helping personal shoppers and retailers know which products are performing better and the trends that are emerging.
Basically, the whole process, from finding looks from luxury labels — major retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and Shopbop are among the vendors on the platform, as are labels like Prada and Chloé — to delivering those looks to clients to the purchase of the items, is streamlined. It’s a little like an affiliate marketing app, but much more personalized and for the wealthy.
The app earns money by taking a percentage (between 2% and 12%) of each sale. It’s on track to earn $1 million in revenue this year, Puerta said. The largest order on the platform so far has been for $130,000.
Over the summer, The Floorr finalized a $1.65 million seed funding round, backed by Carmen Busquets, a cofounder of Net-a-Porter, and Nigora Tokhtabayeva, the founder of jewelry line Tabayer.
It wasn’t easy to raise the money, as she was making the rounds during a notoriously challenging fundraising environment.
“The biggest frustration for us has been the fact that we’ve pitched to incredible tech, retail, fashion tech investors, and they’ve been like, ‘I love this. It makes sense,’ but I have X amount of startups in my portfolio that I need my help because it’s a challenging time,” she said.
Now that the money is in hand, Puerta says it will be used to grow the team and continue to update the product.
The Floorr shared the 12-page pitch deck it used to raise its $1.65 million round.
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