Wanelo

The founder of the project - Dina Varshavskaya – the nee Siberian – founded Wanelo in 2010 in San Francisco. The idea of the project - the personalized shopping - came to it in 2006.

The name Wanelo comes from the first letters of the words "want, need, love" (I want, I need, I love). Mix of the websites for social shopping and visualization of inspiration, like Pinterest, Fancy or Polyvore is the cornerstone of the project.

Business model

For 2012 the startup has no operating business model yet, but his heads are sure that the emphasis on a possibility of purchase of goods will become an integral part of monetization. Monetization of the project is possible at the expense of the commission from the transactions made by users on the website.

Users are registered on the website and post photos or the pleasant things, or own, with indication of the brand and the link to where they can be purchased. Wanelo represents not only service for exchange of beautiful photos and images, but also full-fledged e-commerce the platform on which it is possible to make purchases online. A possibility of shopping – here fundamental difference of Wanelo from Pinterest. According to the creator of the project, Dina Varshavskaya, in Pinterest people follow inspiration, in Wanelo – to do shopping. Target audience - all those who appreciate style and perfection of an image and prefer to make purchases via the Internet^[1].

Performance Indicators

For 2012 about 100,000 elements of clothes are daily uploaded to the site Wanelo on average, and all collection in general contains 1.3 million positions from 24 thousand different shops.

History

In March, 2012 Wanelo attracted investments of a sowing round in the amount of $2 million from Floodgate Capital, First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Naval Ravikant and private investors. planirjdfkjcm to direct the received funds to expansion of operational activity of the company, hiring of additional employees and start of new products.

The Russian fund TMT Investments redeemed a minority stake in the company, proceeding from assessment of $4.4 million for all business.

In March, 2013 Wanelo attracted $11 million more at assessment of the company in $100 million.

In February, 2014 Wanelo received an award of Crunchies Awards 2013 in the Best E-Commerce Application nomination

Competitors

To some extent by competitors it is possible to consider Pinterest (concerning multimedia of content which users share with each other) and TagBrand (concerning pictures of clothes).

Notes