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.
The app, owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, has been promising to help emerging US labels get started selling in China at the same time that TikTok stares down a ban by the US for its ties to China.
Zero10 offers digital solutions through AR mirrors, leveraged in-store and in window displays, to brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Coach. Co-founder and CEO George Yashin discusses the latest advancements in AR and how fashion companies can leverage the technology to boost consumer experiences via retail touchpoints and brand experiences.
Four years ago, when the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok in the US, its Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. worked out a preliminary deal to sell the short video app’s business. Not this time.
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.