Thefancy.com: Subversion of electrical business search

When people first saw Einhorn (Joe Einhorn), it was easy to overlook him. Now 31 years old, he is thin and boyish, accustomed to playing dribbling with basketball in a meeting. His office is located on the top floor of a building in Manhattan's butcher House (meatpacking District), looking out from a wide window to see a lush courtyard and a basketball court. He flaunts his Lanvin (Lanvin) sneakers and uses the word "cool" (dope) as the phrase "Yo" for the Valley Girl (Valley girl).

But in the e-commerce industry, he is a dangerous up-and-comer. You can buy high-end goods from his web site (thefancy.com), which is as broad as the Pinterest, like the Light Blog (TUMBLR), which is driven by money like Amazon. "Our idea is, let's use people with amazing taste to find the coolest thing in the world, and then we ' want ' it, and if businesses and brands see a need around a spot or product that they want to sell, they'll come fancy. ”

Businesses do follow: There are now about 1,000 products for more than 1 million registered members to buy, and membership is growing at a rate of 10,000 per day.

A new retail model is taking shape as users upload compelling pictures and create shopping opportunities through encounters rather than deliberate searches. In a few seconds, you can spend 600 dollars to order a Angel (Bianchi) bike, spend 5,800 dollars to order a Graff (Graff) shower, or spend 642 dollars on a reservation for Greek grace · A day of accommodation in Santorini (Grace Santorini Hotel), all of which can be done without leaving the site-at least theoretically. So far, the net has not received much revenue, Einhorn insists that is not a priority.

Let me give an example of how the website works.

I saw a photo on my favorite men's blog-someone wearing the Martin-Maguila fashion house (Maison Martin Margiela) boot, I saved the photo, added the title, and uploaded it to my web news. Then I add a link to the Martin-Maguila website, write a comment, and categorize the merchandise as "menswear"

After the photo is online, the database that you want to network includes the annotation I added, and the boot is added to the index according to the label, title and keywords of the comment bar.

Soon after, the sales rep at Martin-Maguila's fashion house saw my post when he was looking for the web--if he had the Internet account, he'd get an email notification. The sales rep adds the new product to the Merchant information page's product catalog, fills in the attributes and submits it.

The site will check to make sure that the link between the photo and the seller is legal and that the product is of high quality.

That night, my friend Harry looked for the Internet news, because he was my fan, he saw the boots I released, and received a notice of the sale of the product.

As on any shopping site, he clicks on the link to buy and pay the bill. The money is first escrow by a third party, after the seller accepts the order, 929 dollars minus 10% commission that wants the net, is hit the merchant's account. The whole process is a seamless, secure electronic transaction.

Keeping the site busy is a huge database of thingd created by Einhorn and developers, meaning "object Elves" (Thing Daemon).

The genie handles 150 million items and 1 billion related properties. Einhorn enjoyed it. He joined the Capital IQ when he was 16 years old, and with others at the age of 22 he created a notification technology company (inform Technologies), which collates content for publishers such as Cornell Publishing Company (Nast) and CNN.

You never know what you'll find on the thefancy.com Web site: A picture of Samoan Is. (StarKist) in the Pacific, young women dressed in luxury brands such as Fendi (Fendi) and Dior (Dior), Hearst (Damien Hirst) and Caus (kaws) works. This is like listening to Spotify's music rather than its own playlist, allowing accidental encounters to dominate your shopping sense of smell. Mourproux Sucharita Mulpuru, an E-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, said:

"To a large extent, the web is like fishing with harpoons, and people are looking for what they already know they need-that's why Google is so successful." Want the net to serve another to arrest the shrimp people, they just want to discover some good things. ”

Einhorn's patron is more like a whale hunter than a shrimping man. Last October, the owner of PPR Group, a billionaire in Paris, Fran?ois-henri Pinault, invested 10 million of billions of dollars to buy 10% per cent of the net. "This is a stunning combination of social networks and visual magazines," he said in an e-mail. "In addition, Ashton Kutcher, Music Television (MTV) founder Pittman (Bob Pittman) and Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz) and others have invested 8 million of dollars (they have an unknown number of shares). The web Council includes the microblogging (Twitter) Dorsey, Facebook's Hughes (Chris Hughes) and the billionaire with Boston (Boston Celtics), Jim Pallotta, a hedge-fund operator, Pallotta.

The team that runs the network only has 20 employees, 18 of whom are engineers. They accounted for 60% of Einhorn's monthly expenses (he declined to disclose the exact amount), and another 30% for the development and maintenance of websites and the deployment of large servers in the United States, Europe and Asia. Einhorn has little money to spend on marketing and advertising. Micro-blogging is the main advocate for the web, where it has more than 52,000 fans, including Jacobs (Marc Jacobs), Birch (Tory Burch), West (Kanye) Peace gram (Pink). This May, barneys.com and Ysl.com added the "Want Web" button to the page for all items.

Einhorn claims to have spent almost no money on investment by VC companies. Analyst Mourproux said: "The site's operating costs are not high, they have a lot of content are crowdsourcing, basically as middlemen to facilitate people's transactions." ”

But how to improve the profit of the net? Einhorn says the site's sales are 10,000 dollars a day--1,000 of them are in his pocket. Mobile apps such as the new iphone, and the ability to engage in international transactions, have expanded the online marketplace.

But want the net to enlarge the transaction volume 10 times times, can produce Einhorn to say of handsome profit.

"We have to innovate so we can continue to impress consumers," he said. Then we have to keep working to create a thriving market. He was adept at dribbling around his knees, dribbling under his crotch, barely revealing a trace of anxiety. "Can we prove that our model will create a robust market relative to the way we search for goods on Amazon?" he said. Can we prove that an encounter like E-commerce can make money--even more profitable? ”

User-created content, is not only a great advantage to the network, but also a lingering disadvantage. Copyright infringement is a continuing threat, although the site warns users not to post copyrighted products that could lead to litigation. Einhorn said his team had received "some" requests for the shelves, and he calmed the complainant's anger by adding links and indicating the source of the photos.

Most brands, he says, are happy to have the opportunity to advertise and make money through a product or service.

The site is certainly glamorous. Einhorn scrolling down the home page, eyes peering at the screen and said: "Shopping on our website is easy, right?" ”

"Very relaxed. "I said.

"Of course, of course," he replied. It's awesome. ”

Source: Forbes