The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
With its Series A round, the e-commerce platform that helps fashion and beauty brands build interactive online virtual stores and showrooms has raised a total of $13.4 million. The new round was led by Jump Capital with participation from the Venture Reality Fund and WXR Fund.
Obsess, which has worked with Coach, Dermalogica, Farfetch and Tommy Hilfiger to create online stores using augmented reality that mimics in-person shopping, will use the new investment to expand beyond fashion and beauty into home, entertainment and consumer packaged goods.
The start-up has been around since 2017 and secured pre-seed funding of $775,000 from Lightspeed Ventures, Techstars and from Village Global, a venture fund that includes money from entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. In October, Obsess closed a seed round bringing its total funding to $3.4 million. The company’s goal is to evolve e-commerce shopping beyond the classic thumbnail listings on a white background that had become typical for shopping websites.
Brands are using them for design tasks, in their marketing, on their e-commerce sites and in augmented-reality experiences such as virtual try-on, with more applications still emerging.
Brands including LVMH’s Fred, TAG Heuer and Prada, whose lab-grown diamond supplier Snow speaks for the first time, have all unveiled products with man-made stones as they look to technology for new creative possibilities.
Social networks are being blamed for the worrying decline in young people’s mental health. Brands may not think about the matter much, but they’re part of the content stream that keeps them hooked.
After the bag initially proved popular with Gen-Z consumers, the brand used a mix of hard numbers and qualitative data – including “shopalongs” with young customers – to make the most of its accessory’s viral moment.