NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Choosy, the on-demand social shopping platform where collections are inspired based on the most in-demand fashions on social media, today announced a $5.4 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Innovation Global Capital, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, XFactor Ventures, Supernode Ventures and angel investor Bryan Rosenblatt.
Co-founders Jessie Zeng (Chief Executive Officer), Sharon Qian (Chief Technology Officer) and Mo Zhou (Chief Strategy Officer), former colleagues from Citi, will use the funding to perfect the customer experience, including everything from ordering processes to receiving deliveries on time, and build out their teams ahead of the company’s launch in the summer of 2018. During a test run earlier this year, the team identified street looks inspired by the Hadids and realized this was a huge opportunity when the entire collection they created sold out within hours.
Through a combination of social tagging (users can tag posts with #GetChoosy) and a team of Style Scouts, Choosy identifies the top 10 trending fashions each week. Users can then buy their favorite items, and Choosy will manufacture the fashions on demand and deliver them to shoppers’ doorsteps in as little as two weeks. All looks are designed and produced in-house, so women sizes 0-20 can get today’s most covetable looks without the ticket price of labels.
The team founded the company after realizing there wasn’t a brand addressing the market demand for trending items seen on social media. Their solution was to leverage their deep relationships with manufacturers in China to produce items with accessible price points and deliver a premium customer experience.
“Being an active Instagram user myself, it was impossible to ignore the most frequently asked question posed time and time again on fashion posts: ‘Where can I buy this?’” said Zeng. “I came to the realization that most influencer and celebrity outfits were curated by a team of stylists sourcing from global luxury brands and were completely unaffordable for most people. Armed with my family’s roots in textile manufacturing, I knew there had to be a way to take these popular silhouettes and make them available to shoppers everywhere at better prices.”
Choosy’s agile supply chain allows it to produce garments within 48 hours of them trending online. It makes only what their customers demand, which allows the company to maintain a zero-balance inventory and minimize wasteful production of excess clothing. Since Choosy owns its entire supply chain, such as aspects including technical design and fabric quality control, it can maintain the highest manufacturing standards over every step of the process.
“With the founding team’s backgrounds in supply chain, machine learning and finance, combined with their appreciation for fashion and styling and a relentless devotion in brand creation, Choosy is poised to sit at the helm of the new generation of social commerce, where the shopping experience is a simple extension of consumers’ existing social media habits,” said Tony Florence, General Partner and head of technology investing practice at New Enterprise Associates. “They’ve developed a unique model that combines technology with the fashion expertise of trend scouts to identify what consumers want and create it quickly.”
Choosy will officially launch in July 2018. In the meantime, for more information, please visit www.getchoosy.com.
ABOUT CHOOSY
Choosy is an on-demand social shopping platform where users influence every collection to match their favorite style inspirations. Through social tagging and a team of Style Scouts, Choosy identifies and manufactures trend-driven fashion delivered to shoppers in as little as two weeks. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the ultimate window-shopping experience, creating a new generation of social commerce. All looks are designed and produced in-house, so women sizes 0-20 can get today’s most covetable looks without the ticket price of labels. You see it, you like it, we make it - it’s time to #GetChoosy with your wardrobe.