One King’s Lane wants to be the King of Home Décor

SF e-commerce retailer One King’s Lane is on track to double revenue in 2012, to $200 million. Its clear vertical focus on home décor is working, with a magazine-like, highly graphic approach.  Each day the site launches up to three thousand new home products assembled around inspirational decorating themes.

The news:  One King’s Lane just closed a $50 million Series D financing,  led by Institutional Venture Partners, expected to be their last round.  Also participating were existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Tiger Global Management, and new investor Scripps Networks (parent of HGTV, which could bring terrific synergies).  Total raised to date is $116 million.

Breakeven is forecast at $400 million revenue, in 2013 or 2014. One King’s Lane takes no inventory itself, relying on the manufacturers and third parties.  Staff of 350. A quarter of One Kings Lane’s traffic is via mobile, more on holidays and weekends.

Sources:  Pando Daily, Forbes, Techcrunch.

The Wall Street Journal bets on e-commerce with 72Lux

E-commerce is a key component of a next-generation content model, and the Wall Street Journal has taken a big step in this direction by launching a launching a shoppable gift guide for the holiday season, with more to follow for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s day in 2013, as reported in Advertising Age.

72Lux is “the software that sits behind the site and lets them create any form of content that is shoppable,” according to Heather Marie, 72Lux’s 28-year-old CEO.

Wall Street Journal Select allows readers to purchase the gifts — which range from a $2,900 Tag Heuer watch to a $19.95 book about home-brewing beer — directly from WSJ Select.  Customers can add products from participating retailers, which include Nordstrom, Best Buy, and Coach, to a single shopping cart and pay for them all with one payment.

“The release of the gift guide is really the new beginning of a more-concerted effort to develop additional revenue streams around commerce,” said Alisa Bowen, the chief product officer at Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones.

More from Advertising Age here.

Plus, the Wall Street Journal even promoted the site with a full page ad, Monday, December 8, 2012, page b8:

Retailers Hop to Get Connected

A couple of items today reinforce how shopping behavior is increasingly integrated on- and off-line. Warby Parker co-founder Dave Gilboa explains why he considers retail stores so important, even though they account for less than 10% of sales, in this interview with Gigaom.

“The future of our business and all retail is going to have some mix of online and offline. The economics make a lot more sense to do as much online as possible but we are that seeing customers who are coming into the showroom and interacting with us initially in the offline world, when they buy again their second, third, fourth glasses, they’re doing so directly through the web site,” Gilboa said.

Michael Carney in Pando Daily argues that bricks and mortar retailers need a strategy to win shoppers who arm themselves with mobile phones while they shop in-store.

“Ideally, retailers would flip the script on their e-commerce brethren, not only agreeing to price match or discount against the catalogs of Amazon and others – an admittedly dangerous game – but also allowing users to immediately locate items within a store using their GPS enabled device. Also, stores should generously reward consumers for installing their apps (if they even have one), checking into their physical locations, and sharing items and promotions on social networks. The idea is to have consumers associate shopping in store with the convenience, serendipity, and connectedness common to online commerce.”

 

Mobile Alone Won’t Cut It

E-commerce solutions which enable better consumer discovery, make shopping fun and worthwhile, and improve return on marketing investment for brands or retailers, are poised for growth.  I believe that the best solutions will take an integrated view to web and mobile, i.e., standalone mobile apps won’t cut it.  Here are some points to remember that emerge from Google’s new research study “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior:”

  • 67% of shopping online is done multi-screen
  • 60% of smartphone use is at home
  • 79% of tablet use is at home
  • Only 30% of shopping on a smartphone is driven by search.  Hence an opening for an new approach to preempt Google from building a dominant approach to smartphone shopping.

Click here for a 34 page pdf of the full study.

Do daily deals bring new customers?

A new study of daily deal users is out from Chadwick Martin. Are daily deals are the latest marketing gimmick and likely to peak sometime soon? Key study findings: consumers prefer daily deals that are from a known local business, preferably for a restaurant or entertainment, and for something they already enjoy.  This looks like a cannibalized sale to me. More highlights here.

Also, the New York Times reports that Merchants and Shoppers Sour on Daily Deal Sites.