Fy
Fy is a shoppable Instagram: a daily feed of unique, affordable products from emerging brands around the world.
We’ve made shopping on mobile simple, addictive and fun:
• A curated feed of unique, affordable products personalised to you.
• Beautiful high-res images, gifs and videos that bring the products to life.
• An easy checkout.
• Simple sharing via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
We’re a full-stack business. We stock, photograph, merchandise and ship every product we sell. Everything on Fy ships free, in beautiful Fy envelopes straight through your letterbox.
At the heart is a growing community of emerging brands, ranging from new designers to break-out brands. We offer brands a full stack of services to allow them to do what they do best: designing and manufacturing stunning products.
To deliver our vision, we’ve developed a propriety mCommerce technology platform using cutting edge technologies that allow us to deliver relevant, fast mobile experience.
We founded Fy with one simple purpose: to create the most fun, addictive way to shop on your phone.
And we have huge ambitions. We want to become the world’s #1 mobile shopping and discovery app and platform.
We expect that people will use our app on the bus, in the office, at home in front of the TV to discover and buy products on mobile. We aim to make shopping on mobile as fun and addictive as browsing Instagram and as seamless as ordering an Uber.
There are 3 core insights to Fy:
1. Globally, people of all age ranges have an appetite to discover new, exciting, creative products that allow them to express their style, find their unique look and to project the new ME.
2. We feel that the market for these products is ripe for disruption on both the supply and demand side. We’ve found an almost inexhaustible supply of stunning, affordable, great value products.
3. Mobile is becoming the dominant way that people access information and this will have a transformative effect on retail.
• In Q1 2015 more time was spent accessing the internet through mobile than on desktop in the UK and US.
• By 2020 80% of adults on earth will have a smartphone.
• 29% of US eCommerce transactions are already on mobile.
We believe that mobile will become the new high street. Apps fill the gaps in our days and allow us to explore much like we might browse a boutique, wherever we are.
In our view, established retailers – with their focus on stores and traditional websites – have been slow to react and keep up with these changes.
Equally, we do not believe that there is a mobile-first shopping brand combining our end-to-end experience or unique, affordable products in Europe, in the US or in emerging markets.
We believe that our closest equivalent businesses – with low capital intensity and disruptive supply chain models – are Farfetch (recently valued at $1bn), Wish ($3bn) and Spring ($90m).
Our aim is that customers and suppliers see us as the first and best place to buy and sell on mobile.
As a team we’ve a proven record of rapid, efficient execution. Since we closed our 1st round of funding (£150k) in November 2014 we’ve:
• Built a data driven, proprietary technology platform using cutting edge technologies and architecture used by the likes of Facebook, Soundcloud and Netflix.
• Launched our mobile-optimised website – iamfy.co – as a precursor to our mobile app which is scheduled to launch in late September.
Signed up 120 suppliers from across Europe and the US.
• Shipped over 1000 orders to 30+ countries from the UK to Singapore to India to Taiwan.
• Acquired an audience of over 35,000 users
• Received over 500 user testimonials (see: http://bit.ly/1UfUENd).
There are five priorities for the remainder of 2015:
1. Grow monthly revenue whilst maintaining a cost per order under our contribution margin.
2. Release localised mobile apps across Europe (UK, DE, FR) and the US in October.
3. Deliver on an exciting product pipeline.
4, Increase number of designers put live on site per week.
5. Put in operational processes to support supply and demand growth.
The proceeds of this raise will be used to hire the team to hit these targets. We have a strong pipeline of experienced candidates for these roles.
We expect that this round will take us to August 2016, after this point we will likely look to raise further funds.