Greg Selkoe, streetwear retailer Karmaloop’s founder and former CEO, is once again flexing his e-commerce muscles with a new company, Looklive.
Looklive blends e-commerce with the content of celebrity-focused magazines. The men’s fashion site features photos with captions often seen in tabloids, such as “Lana Del Rey grabs coffee at Western Bagel,” or “Justin Bieber Leaves Tape Nightclub.” Consumers click on the images and see where they can buy the outfit the celebrity is wearing in the photo, or where they can buy a similar version at a lower price.
For example, when a shopper clicks on the Bieber photo, he sees that he can buy the exact Dior sunglasses Bieber is sporting for $620, a similar Yves Saint Laurent pair for $400 or a Ray-Ban version for $150. When the shopper clicks on the “buy” button he is taken to that retailer’s site to buy the product. The shopper also can click on other parts of Bieber’s outfit to see where he can buy the pants, shirt and shoes..
Looklive receives a 15-35% cut of the sale if the consumer makes the purchase, Selkoe says, who is a co-founder. Looklive has about 11,000 shoppable images and links to more than 60,000 products. Looklive works with some retailers directly, including luxury retailer Barneys New York, and with affiliates, such as Staple Design, which gives the site access to hundreds of brands.
In some cases Looklive has deals with brands in which they will set aside some of their inventory for Looklive and drop-ship the product to the customer.
Selkoe says Looklive is gaining traction and has at least 1 million users to date. In July, Looklive sold $120,000 in gross merchandise value, which was 25% higher than June’s sales. A few weeks ago, Looklive launched an iOS app that has reached 60,000 downloads. The e-retailer also plans to launch an Android app within two weeks, he says.
Not owning the merchandise is an essential ingredient to Looklive’s success, Selkoe says. He learned his lesson from Karmaloop, which grew its online sales to an Internet Retailer-estimated $216.3 million in 2014 from $72 million in 2010. Karmaloop filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2015 after a string of e-commerce investments, including women’s fashion e-commerce site MissKL.com and a video production arm called Karmaloop Media, failed to bear fruit. Karmaloop has since been acquired twice.
“To build a huge e-commerce company from scratch where you have to own inventory is very, very costly,” Selkoe says.
Not even a year old, Looklive has already acquired two companies, changed its name and shifted its business model.
Last fall, Selkoe, Cedric Rogers, who is Looklive’s CEO and a former Apple Inc. employee, and Dr. Paul Judge, a co-founder and executive at several technology companies, founded Curateurs.com, and that became Looklive.com. The original concept was to write long-form articles about an outfit worn by a celebrity and describe the backstory of the garment, such as who designed it, if the celebrity wore it on a special night or if he favors the brand. Curateurs would then sell the actual garment the celebrity wore. Curateurs beta launched in early 2016 and went live to the public in April.
In May, the company acquired UpscaleHype.com, an online magazine covering celebrity fashion. The founders of the publication, Kyle and Allen Onyia, joined Curateurs to gather and produce the retailer’s celebrity content. This is when Curateurs shifted its focus to short articles and ditched trying to sell the celebrity’s original apparel because that approach was labor intensive and shoppers often wanted celebrity memorabilia, not clothes to wear themselves, Selkoe says.
In July, Curateurs acquired Looklive, a two-year-old shoppable celebrity image site. Along with Looklive’s assets, Curateurs decide to take the name. The company combined Looklive’s technology with the technology Selkoe, Rogers and Judge had already started building— image recognition and tagging technology, plus integrating the UpscaleHype.com images—and Looklive morphed into its current look. The Curateurs.com URL now redirects to Looklive.com. Looklive has about 10 employees.
Looklive secured a three-month stint in startup incubator Y Combinator, which has funded such startups as Airbnb Inc., Instacart and DoorDash. Between Y Combinator, investment firm Judge Ventures, where Judge is a managing partner, and funding from the co-founders, Looklive has raised $140,000, Selkoe says. It will soon look to raise a round of $1.5 million, he says.