After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family, Kristine Locker finally decided to launch a social shopping platform (which she named after herself) that could take her endless tabs and organize them into a shareable, virtual wish list all in one place.
Locker, dubbed as the “Pinterest for online shopping,” launched in 2022 as a Chrome extension and allows you to save any online product into categorized wish lists, discover outfit collages made by other users, collaborate with friends and create giftable collections to be shared via email or social media. It’s also available as an iOS app.
Locker recently closed on a $2.5 million round from Wonder Ventures at a $9 million valuation, the company announced today.
“Kristine Locker has figured out something which Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook have all tried and failed to nail down,” Wonder Ventures’ Valentina Rodriguez said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Shopping is the core product around which socialization happens, not vice-versa. Largely due to the fact that she has the perfect founder/product fit, she has built a platform for which socialized commerce is just wonderfully user-friendly and inherently viral.”
Unlike influencer-focused platforms LTK, Collective Voice and Split, which are designed to monetize a large social media following, Locker is designed for everyday consumers who just want to curate shoppable collections for fun.
“When I looked at the competitive landscape, there were platforms that were built for influencers… as a consumer, none of that really fit my need to organize my shopping [and] also have an organic place where I could see what my friends were shopping for, which is really what I wanted to see,” Locker’s founder told us. “A big part of [Locker’s] mission is to create a user-generated authentic sharing platform where there’s no monetization around it so you don’t feel like ‘Oh, someone’s sharing this with me because they can make money off of it.’”
Although you can’t earn cash from sharing products on Locker, you can join its “Shopping Club” to get rewarded when friends use your referral link. For instance, you get exclusive Locker merch if you refer 25 users to Locker. At 500 users, you get $750 to purchase an outfit from your Locker collection, the startup’s founder explains.
Regarding Locker’s business model, the company earns revenue by partnering with brands through affiliate networks. Its average commission rate is around 12%, however, depending on how much exposure the brand wants, Locker raises the rate to as high as 25%.
“If brands don’t play in the affiliate space, we remove them from the discovery page to keep it fair for the brands that are participating,” Locker says.
The company’s recent funding round comes two years after Cabell Hickman, a Locker user and higher-education consultant who was featured in The Wall Street Journal for her $6 million portfolio, notably invested $1 million into the company. Other investors include former Honey exec Chris Arreguin, Elizabeth Egan (Breakaway Ventures), Maggie Sellers (HSR Ventures), Kira Jackson (Rx3 Growth Partners), Alex Doman (AVEC Drinks) and Tariro Makoni, senior strategy manager of global startups at AWS.
Locker touts 80,000 monthly active users.
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