Platform evolves live shopping and reveals future plans

The platform ‘Get the Trend’, founded by Laura Merle a year ago, wants to revolutionize the customer experience by making ‘live shopping’ the core of its business model.

“I started ‘Get The Trend’ with a desire to respond to the needs of brands. They often struggle to create a customer experience online that matches the in-store experience,” Laura Merle explained over the phone. For this reason, and noting that “Generations X, Y and Z have a need to participate and identify”, the former fashion communications specialist founded ‘Get The Trend’ in September 2021.

The multibrand platform with a product catalog of four million items differs in the optimization of live shopping. This is how the tool supports product descriptions, but most importantly, and this is its gist, users can use it to recommend an item they liked. The product may or may not have been purchased on the platform, it is sufficient if it is listed there.

“Whether you have 5 or 500,000 followers, you have influence,” says the founder. She believes this democratization leads to more authentic and honest recommendations. This can be done via live shopping or via a tracking link. In both cases, “Share Sellers”, i.e. the people who make a recommendation, receive a commission on all sales made. If they sell 100 shopping carts at $1,000, they earn $2,000; if they refer 250 people and the referees make five sales with an average shopping cart of 200 euros, the share sellers earn 2,500 euros.

The business model of ‘Get The Trend’ is therefore based entirely on customer recommendations. This idea seems to excite a lot of people. The platform’s crowdfunding campaign achieved its goals in six days. The funding is intended to enable the development of the ‘Get The Trend’ app (scheduled for launch in June 2023), which is intended in particular to facilitate the taking of live shopping photos.

Second round of financing in sight

‘Get The Trend’, which raised EUR 400,000 in its first round of financing, is now preparing a second round of financing, which will be used to finance several projects. On the one hand, the company is developing a B2B solution to offer its recommendation format to branded e-commerce websites, and on the other hand, it plans to enter the second-hand market.

“We’re considering it, but we want to approach it differently than what’s typically found on the market today,” the founder said of second-hand clothing. “It’s part of our 2023 goals and raising capital. They include second-hand, but also a desire to showcase more responsible brands. But we don’t want to do greenwashing, so we need established charters and real governance behind them.”

The company now has 900 members on its platform, more than 5,000 brands and between 7,000 and 8,000 visitors per month. The company has partnerships with Sarenza, La Redoute, Sensee, Galeries Lafayette, Matches Fashion and is also in the process of organizing a live shopping of the Tranoï fair in Paris.

This article was similarly published on FashionUnited.fr. Translation and editing: Barbara Russ.