Little Black Bag gets $2.75M for unique ecommerce model

Little Black Bag has a totally new take on Web shopping with strong social networking element

Online shopping and fashion site Little Black Bag announced Thursday a $2.75 million in Series A funding, led by investors GRP Partners, with participation from DCM, Chamath Palihapitiya, Tim Kendall, David Tisch, among others.

Little Black Bag is a unique shopping experience, with elements of social networking. It draws from the Japanese shopping concept fukubukuro, or “lucky bag sale”, where shoppers buy a mystery bag of fashion products and trade the items with friends.

Except on Little Black Bag, the user takes an interactive style quiz and is offered a "mystery bag" of personalized fashion and beauty products. Then the user trades those items with other people for up to a week, after which those items left in their bags after the trading process are shipped to the user.

There are two pricing options, a single purchase plan at $59.95 or a monthly membership of $49.95. So far, Little Black Bag has partnered with 30 brands, like Z Spoke by Zac Posen, BCBGeneration, Betsey Johnson, and Kenneth Jay Lane, among others.

VatorNews contacted company co-founder Dan Murillo, to learn more about the company.

"We’re ahead of plan in terms of site registrations and purchases so we’re off to a great start," said Murillo. "As with any exciting new model, there’s been a lot of interest to try out the site. The key success metric for us will be repurchase rates, which is really the best way for us to measure how much customers enjoy the experience."

Yves Sisteron, Partner & Co-Founder at GRP Partners, will join the company’s board of directors at Little Black Bag. Barbara Wambach, previously a President at Bebe, EVP at Gap, and CEO at eLuxury, will join the board as an independent director.

Launched in 2011 by Murillo, Sasha Siddhartha, and David Weissman, the company is headquartered in Los Angeles with a buying and merchandising office in New York City.

"[The new] Buying & Merchandising team in New York is led by Suzanne King, a 14 year veteran from Macy’s," said Murillo to VatorNews. "We’ll be further expanding our design & tech teams as well. We strongly believe in the power of beautiful & simple design when introducing new consumer internet experiences."

I can honestly say that this is an ecommerce model I've never seen before. Big kudos to Little Black Bag for originality of vision.