Company description
CovetedList™ provides a learning platform for digital media and E-commerce partners that acquires, creates and manages the smart data that allows users to develop relationships with the products they like and the e-tailers that sell
them. Our technology can be applied towards any personalized purchase; our first vertical is apparel. For users, we are a true virtual shopping service, a cross-section of intensive profiling with learning and matching technology, and experiential information sharing. For partner customers the benefits we provide or four-fold: 1) Increase in sales uplift through highly valuable, personalized recommendations; access to new affiliate program revenues. 2) Improved customer loyalty, customization tools, and improved user experience. 3) Personalized outreach and programs: yield management and social graph campaigns. 4) More detailed, real-time market research data on demand via a SaaS interface.
Team
• Charlotte Kim, CEO/ Founder. Charlotte has 15 years of technology and leadership experience in mobile and enterprise data solution companies like ATTWS, Siebel Systems, Good Technology and Rapt. As a consultant she
has helped dozens of Web 2.0 companies define strategy, build team structure and pinpoint key hires. Her most recent experience was starting her own company Zimu, Inc., where she authored a provisional patent for a semantic search platform, now part of a large global data management company where it has become a key technology for their Internet strategies. Charlotte earned her MBA from HBS where she was a Kauffman Fellow, her BA from Harvard College and is a professionally trained executive coach through the Coaches Training Institute.
• Alex Lin, Chief Science Officer. Alex has 10 years of experience at Search Engine and E-Commerce companies such as Bluefly.com and Pronto. An innovator, Alex leads technology R&D resources concentrating on areas such as Information Retrieval and Collaborative Filtering and Semantic Search. Before started his own data consulting firm, Intelligent Mining, Inc., Alex helped architect the semantic platform for Zimu, Inc. Alex earned his MS in Information System from Pace University and his BS in Biology from Tunghai University.
Business model
CovetedList has two revenue streams.
• The most immediate revenue will be commission revenue. We participate in the Network Affiliate model. We are already members of Commission Junction and Linkshare. Others who share this revenue model: StyleFeeder, ShopStyle, Glimpse.com and Like.com.
• Our main revenue stream and differentiator, will be real time, semantic generated market research and business intelligence: forecasting and trending cross referenced at detailed demographic levels. (Significant for retail, research, CPG and media for planning and managing marketing, inventory anddemand.) Our multiple streams of real time personalized data that can be mixed and matched (semantically) to allow enterprise market research customers to get the custom real time reports.
Competitive advantage
Competition:
The market research landscape is very broad, everyone from Gartner and Yankee Group to Nielsens. We are focusing on the sector that provides consumer or user behavior market research. Our top competitors include:
• NPD Group. Approximately $160M in annual revenues across 15 verticals. They are the leading market research provider in retail data. They were found over 30 years ago.
• Nielsen’s. Approximately $4.5B in annual revenues. They are the number one provider of market research in the world. They provide usage data across almost all communication mediums.
With respect to other style sites, our space is very busy. There are a lot of players vying to be the dominant apparel/fashion destination site. Everyone from online magazines like Sugar or Style.com, to e-tailers, online trunk shows like Gilt, or gaming/visual sites like Polvore. However currently CovetedList is the only player focusing on the deep web or individual personalization; thus we view each “competitor” a potential partner/customer.