Svpply picks up $550K seed for social retail

Elegant social retail experience presents premium items in a simple stream

Just in time for the biggest shopping season of the year, yet another shopping site gets funded.

Social retail site Svpply has raised a $550,000 seed investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective with participation from angel investors Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn, Spark Capital principal Mo Koyfman has confirmed.

Svpply (pronounced “supply”), at its most superficial, is an elegant stream of cool, fancy and not inexpensive items for sale over the Web. Hop over to the main page now and you’ll see a Mickey Mouse lego hybrid designer toy ($140), a red “Hills Angeletts” sweater (8925 Japanese yen, or about $107), and a blue Idelwood backpack ($60). Not the most ordinary shopping list.

Lots of sites offer rare and unique items for sale, but Svpply seeks to set itself apart by adding a social layer to the shopping experience. Users who register for the site can add items they see to their own Svpply page (as an example, here’s the page for designer Ben Pieratt, one of the company’s co-founders). If you like his taste, then as a Svpply user you can start following him, to more easily discover the things he discovers.

Similarly, one can follow stores, like Wintercheckfactory, that show off all their products on the site.

“The first eCommerce revolution was about translating offline activities to the web,” argues Koyfman. “This next wave is about redefining the shopping experience in a way that leverages the web’s unique social capabilities and the omnipresence of sophisticated mobile devices. It’s about creating a more social, more connected, more interesting and simply better way to shop.”

Like any modern social experience, Svpply does not fence its users into the site. Items advertised on retail shops all over the Web can be added to a user’s Svpply account via a browser bookmarklet that makes it easy to tag new items, which, in turn, other users can discover through Svpply. Additionally, apps for Android and iPhone are in development.

Users don’t necessarily need yet another place to shop, but if Svpply with its social layer can prove to be a kind of “one hub to rule them all,” then it could be a powerful new commerce tool.