Welcome to the ninth episode in the Elevator Pitch series 3.
Every week we publish a 30 second pitch from 12 leading startups from across London. In this series we took the founders to the top of 40 Bank Street in the heart of Canary Wharf for the most exciting pitch of their lives.
Increasingly, parents want to buy great products for their children that reflect their own values, be that organic or ethically sourced clothing, or classic toys with a strong educational focus.
Finding those products isn’t always easy though. There is an incredible community of passionate businesses and individuals who are making or sourcing high quality inventory from around the world but they often struggle with an increasingly competitive e-commerce market.
That’s the problem StorkUp aims to solve – acting as the bridge between the community and the businesses.
Starting off
StorkUp makes it easy for parents to find the amazing products that they are looking for. They take top quality products from hundreds of independent kids retailers and put them right at parents’ fingertips.
The platform allows retailers to get on with providing the best products by taking e-commerce problems out of the equation.
Users shop from multiple specialists with a single basket and a single checkout. No longer do they have to trawl the web for products, buying from four or five different retailers.
Change of plans
The current platform wasn’t always what StorkUp had envisaged. Co-founder Craig McDonald explains:
We initially came up with the idea to build a social shopping community for parents, allowing them to to share products with each other and view lists related to specific ages and stages.
We pitched this at mini-Seedcamp London in 2011, and six months later raised a £460k seed round. We launched the first version of this in July 2013 and almost right away realised that we were attempting to solve the correct problem, but in the wrong way!
We initially came up with the idea to build a social shopping community for parents, allowing them to to share products with each other and view lists related to specific ages and stages.They then found that a new approach of just acting as a discovery platform and then directing the customer over to the individual retailer didn’t go far enough either.
What consumers wanted was a complete marketplace dedicated to baby products, and that’s what StorkUp became.
Going forward
The platform has raised a £460k seed round, and is currently raising a further £250k with a view to doing a Series A early next year.
They work with hundreds of retailers from a dozen countries, and Craig says their goal is to get to the stage where they are working thousands of retailers globally.
And their most exciting development so far?
Without a doubt, it was our very first order on the new marketplace platform.
We’d spent 3 months frantically building all the transactional functionality necessary and then when we pushed it live, the very first order (from someone other than our mums) was for £150 worth of stuff from four different retailers – which was exactly the point of the thing we’d just built.