Fashion discovery platform Rad has announced a €2.5 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures, as well as The Kooples founding partner Nicolas Santi-Weil. The platform promises “cool products, every day,” and has grown to 200,000 users through viral and word-of-mouth growth. This round of funding will go into logistics & marketing efforts as they prepare to roll out in UK & Germany.
Alongside cofounders Anthony Serero (CEO), Simon Amazalag (CFO), and Julia Serero (Chief buyer), I caught up with David Smadja (CMO), to discuss how the company grew so quickly, having just launched last July, and how they plan to grow down the road:
“….At the time, we were 4 founding partners and 2 interns. We self-financed our business and grew rapidly to 200k members only through word of mouth. No marketing at all.”
Bringing cool to digital is a huge effort. Players like Lyst have been working on this for quite some time, with Fab.com and Pinterest also falling into this same category. While Rad’s business model currently focuses on a Vente-Privée style “flash sale” system (hyper sales with a very short duration of time), it is important that the product’s vision is in line with its business model:
“Fashion has become much more open with internet and a cool product can now become an instant classic as people spread content through their medias. Fashion is now more than ever a fast and ever-changing set of products, and so we don’t believe in 2, 3 or 4 collections a year but rather hundreds of them. With our sales, and with our future plans, we plan to bring hundreds of collections a year, and have the people themselves be part of what we do. ” – David Smadja, CMO
Having grown from a founding team to the 30 people they are today, Rad is certainly on the warpath towards bringing cool products to cool people. Only time will tell.