Popshop Live Became Essential for LA Boutiques During the Shutdown. Now It’s Got $3M to Grow
Jul 08 2020
Retail is now live streaming.
Popshop Live, which raised $3 million led by Floodgate and Abstract Ventures, wants users to shop on their phones as if they're browsing through products and interacting with clerks in a store. The live-streaming service takes a new twist on home shopping.
Launched last year by CEO and founder Danielle Li, Popshop Live will use the funds to help build out its audience as the company tries to convince shop owners to set up mini-studios inside their businesses. In all the company has raised $4.5 million.
<p>The idea of the application came to Li back in 2016, after watching hundreds use Snapchat and Periscope to live stream an Obama speech she attended. While online commerce continues to grow, it often lacks that kinetic energy that is found from being around others. And sellers struggle to grow amid a crowded online marketplace. </p><p>Popshop Live allows businesses to expand beyond traditional e-commerce engagement, giving customers the chance to be in a store along with thousands of other virtual guests. </p>
Popshop Live Demo Reel
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/435886105" width="100%" height="480" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4c65eda71fd4b09efe2e7c4534246785"></iframe><p>"I think our mission is really to inspire and empower people to expand their identity, experience and connection," she said.</p><p>Since the COVID-19 breakout, Li saw a jump in users joining the platform as businesses sought to keep their stores afloat.</p><p>Los Angeles boutiques such as Japan LA, Popkiller, 3D Retro, Leanna Lin's Wonderland, Poketo and BellaBar were forced to shut down their physical stores amid the pandemic. Instead, they turned to Popshop Live for support.</p><p>"We definitely feel honored that we have an opportunity to become a part of the recovering process for several local stores affected by not only COVID, but also by looting in Los Angeles," said Li.</p>
<p><br/></p><p>The application allows shops to share their livestream via their social platforms or to embed it online, while shoppers purchase directly from the stream.</p><p>Investors also include Long Journey Ventures, Cyan and Scott Banister, Shrug Capital, Backend Capital and Halogen Ventures. Local Los Angeles investors Watertower Ventures and AET Fund joined in the round.<br/></p><p>"Danielle and the Popshop Live team have created the best consumer shopping experience at a time when community and virtual connectedness are needed more than ever," said Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed stage venture capital firm in announcing their support. </p><p>Popshop Live is looking beyond brick-and-mortar stores and will host anyone looking to expand their audience from influencers to national retailers. But for now, it's invite only. </p><p>"We would like to see Popshop like a platform that people come to have fun, get inspired and connect to their community," said Li.</p>Related Articles Around the Web
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Offices will be bigger and oriented around creating a sense of community, omnichannel retail will be more important, brands will have dozens of stores instead of thousands, and cities will provide incentives to lure employees rather than companies. Those are some of the predictions about what will happen in the next few years as the world recovers from the coronavirus, according to Brendan Wallace, co-founder and managing partner at Fifth Wall, Justin Bedecarre, co-founder and CEO of HelloOffice and Jen Nguyen, founding partner of TEAMWERC.
Fifth Wall is the largest venture capital firm focused on real estate tech, known as proptech. It announced the close of its second real estate technology fund last year, with $503 million in dry powder, making it the largest VC fund in Los Angeles. HelloOffice is a technology-powered commercial real estate brokerage that started in the Bay Area and expanded to L.A. last year. TEAMWERC is a San Francisco-based commercial real estate consultancy.
<p>Wallace, Bedecarre and Nguyen spoke to dot.LA in advance of an <a href="https://dot.la/fifth-wall-hellooffice-strategy-session-2646099591.html" target="_blank">executive strategy session Tuesday at 11 am PST</a> about the future of real estate after the novel coronavirus. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:</p><p><strong><a href="https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/05/26/retail-stores-reopen-la-county/" target="_blank">Retail shops have been opening in Los Angeles and elsewhere.</a> How quickly do you think people will want to go shopping?</strong></p><p>Wallace: I think there's probably two considerations. One is that you actually have some pent-up demand. So, I think you will see a surge, and I think you actually have seen that in cities like Phoenix. What I'm not clear on is if that's a false positive, and what we're likely to see going forward because we haven't seen the second peaks occurring in cities and how the public will react to that. We're in the very early innings of probably a surge in retail bankruptcies. As stores go dark that just drives down foot traffic, and I think alongside that you have this forced adoption of e-commerce that just occurred over the last 75 days. That experience is going to have a long-term effect and I think about it like we pulled the future forward. Whatever was going to happen in 2022 or 2023 is happening now in 2020, and the confounding variable on top of that is the uncertainty around COVID and the public response to it so the one thing I feel confident in saying is it is not going to go back to business as usual.</p><p><strong>That sounds like a lot of uncertainty, which is understandable because no one really knows what's going to happen in terms of the health considerations. But as someone who has this big retail fund, what, how are you deploying that?</strong></p><p>Wallace: Our retail fund is focused on brands that are omnichannel, so those are brands that are selling both online and offline. This crisis has underscored is that to really have resiliency in circumstances like this, a brand needs to be ubiquitous. You need to be able to reach consumers where they are and that can be on their computer, their phone or in a store. I think the more omnichannel a brand is, the more durable they are in a situation like this so we are still actively looking to invest in those brands. I think the other distinction about how we invest in retail versus how retail is traditionally conceptualized is that some of the brands that are out there today — like Old Navy and Gap — you're talking about hundreds in some cases thousands of stores. I don't think even the largest, most prolific omnichannel brand is ever going to have 1,000 stores. I think that era is over. What you're seeing is just smaller real estate footprints and a concentration of those footprints in higher-quality real estate assets. In many ways this crisis is hurting the weakest assets. The malls in the shopping centers that were already struggling are going to struggle more in this crisis and this could be a body blow. But I think the stronger assets, the assets that were always desirable, and the high streets in retail real estate that were always desirable to many brands are going to come back for no other reason then there's still going to be a street life in cities. I don't think that's going away.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQyMzEyMS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwMTg5MDM2M30.1NUlj_9c_wOBv-5KjRVBTc_DaX2iYwCduUV3Of94fow/image.png?width=980" id="2805c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="64b8b3ef154f375270e4c0262a4973cd" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Left to right: Justin Bedecarre, co-founder and CEO of HelloOffice, Jen Nguyen, founding partner of TEAMWERC, and Brendan Wallace, co-founder & managing partner at Fifth Wall.</small></p><p><strong>Just looking at cities in general, there's this whole potential ripple effect from people not working as much in big cities. Do you see that actually happening, lots of tech workers moving out of San Francisco?</strong><br/></p><p>Wallace: I think you can generalize more broadly than tech workers and make it knowledge workers, who are less required to work in cities than they were in January of this year. The experience of many companies is that working remotely has been surprisingly productive. But the reason cities formed in the first place was to accommodate businesses and people and create a social dynamic which drove people together where you had to go to the market square to buy things. What's happened with technology – e-commerce being a prime example – is we virtualized much of that meaning. So, we've stripped away many of the commercial benefits of concentrating businesses and people together. And so what I think cities are left considering is because there's no longer the commercial magnetism of pulling everyone together it really has to come down to the social magnetism, that we like being around other people. I'm curious to see how much people want to go back to cities.</p><p><strong>Justin, how much work do you see returning to the office once the threat from the pandemic subsides?</strong></p><p>Bedecarre: Offices are really going to be built around what they're meant to be built around, which is collaboration. In the short term, square footage per person is going to go way up. The way that we're thinking about our spaces at HelloOffice is that we're going to be doing a phased-in approach to bring in key members and desks are going to be spread out significantly. Fewer people are going to be coming into the office at any given time. Whether it equals out for how many people are in the office versus how many square feet per person is is hard to predict with certainty. But square footage per person will trend upwards, not downward as it has been for over a decade.</p><p><strong>Jen, are you seeing a similar trend? </strong></p><p>Nyugen; Oh definitely. It's really typical for a lot of tech startups that we work with, their standard square foot per person is 100 square feet per person. But what we've seen in doing the six foot social distance studies is a lot of the companies we work with need extra space, so instead of 100-square-feet per person they're needing at least 300 square feet, at a minimum.</p><p><strong>Are you hearing from clients that they want to go back to the office?</strong></p><p>Nyugen: We're hearing more of we're going back to the office in some shape or form but in a phased approach.</p><p><strong>Is there a specific timeline you're getting from most companies about when they want to come back?</strong></p><p>Nyugen: The timelines are consistent with specific regions. For example, in San Francisco a lot are looking towards the end of Q3. A lot of them are also identifying within their own or organization which functions they deem critical.</p><p><strong><span></span>Justin, it seems like there has been something specific about startups that they need to physically work together. Do you think that will change now?</strong></p><p>Bedecarre: I do think overall, especially in the early stages, having everyone together working in one place has significant advantages. But it's not for everyone. Gitlab and WordPress have built some phenomenal companies being 100% remote, but that certainly isn't where most companies will end up.</p>
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Every month 10 million shoppers scroll through Tapcart, a little-known software that translates the $95 billion ecommerce giant Shopify's platform to mobile.
The marketing software has seen shopping activity jump 50% over the past 90 days as the pandemic wallops traditional retailers. And chief executive Eric Netsch is aiming to process $1 billion in sales over the next year. In May alone, the company is expected to hit $71 million of online retail sales through its mobile app.
<p>But the Santa Monica-based company's biggest get may have happened a few days before California Gov. Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home order came down. Founders Netsch and Sina Mobasser had been pitching venture capitalist for a Series A round when they scored with SignalFire, which committed to lead the $10 million round. The nation's economy was about to go into free-fall. </p><p>"We didn't know companies were going to have a hard time getting funded, we didn't know that the economy was going to collapse. We didn't know about the stay-at-home order at the time," he said. "The timing was impeccable and we're happy that we found the right partner."</p><p>Flush with funds, Tapcart is planning a marketing and expansion blitz in an effort to grow the business software company as it looks to grow its offerings. Since it was founded in 2017, Tapcart has raised a total of $15 million.</p><p> Like a lot of e-commerce products, Tapcart — whose clients include fast-fashion seller Fashion Nova, Chubbies and other brands — has benefited from the pivot to online shopping. The largest growth has been among smaller and medium size businesses that haven't had to deal with some of tough logistical issues facing larger companies. It's also seen a jump in food and beverage along with retailers selling sports apparel and supplements, as people were forced to remake their workout routines at home. </p><p>"The behavior will be permanent because people are realizing they can get everything on their mobile app on their phone," he said. </p><p>In April, consumer spending nosedived 16%, but online sellers — which make up a smaller share of the market — saw sales increase 8.4%.<br/></p><p>The surge in store closings has toppled already ailing retail giants like Pier1 Imports and JCPenny, and walloped other retailers facing mounting debts. </p><p>"We have traditional retailers who have closed a lot of their retail stores and shifted all of their traffic onto their apps in their website," he said. </p><p>Among them is New Jersey-based DressBarn which recently launched a mobile app as it, like other retailers, go into survival mode. </p><p>Until now, Tapcart has relied solely on Shopify, a popular sales platform that has made it easier for small and mid-size businesses to create online stores, to distribute its product. </p><p>Tapcart, which sells monthly subscriptions ranging from $99 to $999, has only about 1,000 paying customers in a sea of over one million merchants using Canada-based Shopify's platform. But it plans to offer a decoupled version of its mobile applications to customers. Its pitch is that it helps with customer retention, an expensive proposition in the online world. </p><p>"We have a lot of room to grow," he said. "Part of our expansion plan is that we want to start working with Fortune 1000 brands like the JC Penny's and Nordstroms to start using our technology in their own custom built solution."</p><p>Chris Farmer, the managing director of SignalFire, said the company had "massive opportunity to also help retailers get back on their feet with mobile and offline commerce."</p>
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