Social Shopping

Let’s talk about Kaboodle, the very first company you started. It was one of the first fashion-oriented shopping platforms for women online. And so how did you come up with that idea? And then how do you keep on coming up with new ideas?

So, the Kaboodle came from a personal pain that my wife and I were having as we were doing our home remodel and home decoration project, because we were just working on that, we couldn’t find an effective tool online to do that. So, Kaboodle started as a collaborative shopping engine really initially focused on home. But through sort of the early discovery, we found that the real connection was with women and fashion.
And think of Kaboodle today, the closest platform there would be Pinterest. It was a place where you could bid and add these items, etc, to these boards, which we call Kaboodle Lists. And you would collaborate on it, and you share it and you made it social. So, we pioneered in fact, in 2006, the term social shopping, and I remember bringing that up to my investors. And they said, “You know, why should shopping be social? Shopping should just be researching, and all of that.” And we realized that we were sitting in a room full of men, and for us, shopping at that time was not social. And I also realized that I needed to bring in a woman in our team. So, we actually actively recruited… because our co-founders were all men for Kaboodle, we recruited our first woman teammate who came in as our head of marketing and design. And she helped transform the product into 06’/07’. And ultimately, that got acquired by Hearst and became part of the Hearst Magazines Group.