{"id":14383,"date":"2013-06-20T09:00:36","date_gmt":"2013-06-20T07:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=14383"},"modified":"2019-04-30T18:53:36","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T16:53:36","slug":"with-1m-users-fashion-discovery-platform-rad-raises-e2-5m-from-index-ventures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2013\/06\/with-1m-users-fashion-discovery-platform-rad-raises-e2-5m-from-index-ventures\/","title":{"rendered":"With 1M+ users, fashion discovery platform Rad raises \u20ac2.5M from Index Ventures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-14390\" alt=\"rad\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/assets\/rad-e1371681739796.png\" width=\"649\" height=\"425\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Fashion discovery platform\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.raaad.fr\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rad<\/a>\u00a0has announced a \u20ac2.5 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures, as well as The Kooples founding partner Nicolas Santi-Weil. The platform promises &#8220;cool products, every day,&#8221; and has grown to 200,000 users through viral and word-of-mouth growth. This round of funding will go into logistics &amp; marketing efforts as they prepare to roll out in UK &amp; Germany.<\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;&#8230;.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.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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&#8217;s business model currently focuses on a Vente-Priv\u00e9e style &#8220;flash sale&#8221; system (hyper sales with a very short duration of time), it is important that the product&#8217;s vision is in line with its business model:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;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&#8217;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. &#8221;\u00a0&#8211; David Smadja, CMO<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fashion discovery platform\u00a0Rad\u00a0has announced a \u20ac2.5 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures, as well as The Kooples founding partner Nicolas Santi-Weil. The platform promises &#8220;cool products, every day,&#8221; and has grown to 200,000 users through viral and word-of-mouth growth. This round of funding will go into logistics &amp; marketing efforts as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":14390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[8699],"class_list":["post-14383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance","tag-index-ventures-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}