Beyond Amazon — curated marketplaces get sophisticated

The word “curation” can stick to just about anything. Remember when Parisian concept store Colette opened Le Water Bar in its basement, with a choice of 73 different mineral waters? Applying an edit to water was a neat fashion in-joke, but also timeless business thinking: know a very specific market well and supply exactly what it wants.

In the age of smartphones and artificial intelligence, however, curation is finding a tech edge. Sourcerie, a shopping platform for beauty products that launched in February, uses software to sift through hundreds of thousands of online consumer reviews and recommend a highly personalised beauty cabinet to its customers, based on detail they supply about their skincare problems and wishes.

Sourcerie co-founder Kristin Cardwell says the idea for Sourcerie surfaced when she suffered a flare-up of eczema during pregnancy. “I got creams from the doctor but only made it worse. There was no easy way to figure out what would work, the best things came from other people. Scouring Reddit threads and finding reviews was really hard — I thought, ‘well is there a way to scale this?’”

The British start-up closed a £1.8mn pre-seed funding round in March, led by Playfair Capital and Vorwerk Ventures. She describes the business as a “tech company first. Half of our team is technical, which is an unusual balance for a beauty slash retail offering. It’s difficult to structure messy data, and the tech stack is quite complicated. The entire platform is custom built.”

The traditional “marketplace model”, as it’s known to the industry, thrives amid all of the noise about brands and products on the internet, using a single website platform to present a useful cut-through. Unlike traditional online retailers, there is no warehouse and no stock to worry about. The host simply takes a commission when a sale is made, and in some cases, also handles customer service.

Curated marketplaces are by nature selective, while also maintaining a cohesive, coherent sense of the platform’s own brand. Farfetch’s offering is centred around independent, high-end fashion brands; Shipt’s on local stores. Some marketplaces are more open, such as Amazon, meaning they welcome almost any brand to the site.

We want to enable a natural human behaviour — seeking a recommendation — and use tech to scale that

Sourcerie is leveraging something that most consumers (myself included) will have noticed themselves doing — spending a considerable amount of time reading what other people have said about a product before committing to buy it.

“We want to enable a natural human behaviour — seeking a recommendation — and use tech to scale that,” Cardwell says. “We work with both retailers and brands to integrate their products and reviews into our brand, and show a marketplace to the consumer. It’s a curation of reviews, not just products. What are people just like me saying about this product?”

Claire Spackman launched Consumerhaus in the US in January as an online home for “the internet’s favorite brands”, focused at launch on beauty and wellness. Like Sourcerie, Consumerhaus is based on the idea that the overwhelming choice of the internet presents an opportunity.

“With 20,000 CPG [consumer packaged goods] products launching every year, I realised there is a need for curation,” Spackman says. “The big retailers — Amazon, Walmart — are search- and convenience-based. There is a white space for consumers who want to know where a product was made, how it was made, are they compensating their workers fairly.”

She and her “lean team” of contractors take a somewhat analogue approach, browsing Instagram to find new products, looking for “Gen Z” colour palettes and typography, “better for you” values in both how a company operates and what it sells, and a sense of social mission and openness. They review each product personally, just as a retail buyer would. Inclusion on the site is all but an endorsement, with information and interviews with the brand’s founders.

“Social confirmation is what a lot of modern consumers are looking for — brands that do well on Instagram are being open and vulnerable — it might be a failed production run, or mental health breakdown of the founders, these have much higher brand loyalty,” says Spackman.

At first glance, Glassette doesn’t look like a marketplace — it looks like a classic retail site for British-made homewares, and that’s not by accident. The 15-month-old start-up invests in good design for its product listings, so that bobbin mirror frames and napkin rings look like they come from the same source. It also has a tastemaker, Laura Jackson, who is the exemplar of its cottage-core-meets-London-chic aesthetic.

Co-founder Daniel Crow comes from a buying background that taught him to think of the “consumer first”, he says. “We have to pre-empt what they want to shop, whilst making sure it does feel like the products are tied together, and that there’s an overarching brand. Many marketplaces throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” This unity is not necessarily price-sensitive: “Our range is £10 for a candle to £2,000 for a daybed, so we’re appealing to a range of customers.”

It’s hard to cut through the clutter on Instagram. It’s the same problem that I see on Amazon — the lack of curation

As scale is the route to profit for the marketplace model, Glassette is looking to add more homeware categories so that a whole home, from paint job to sofa choice, could be furnished on the site. “It’s not just a nice vase for the fireplace, we want to be a one-stop shop.” And in due course, this may mean adoption of more sophisticated technology. “We’re looking to introduce smart filtering; we already have close to 8,000 products on the site.”

The irony is that Instagram itself is left out of the party. It recently dropped its curated “Shop” tab, switching its focus back on to user loyalty to individual influencers, and a bet that people will pay subscriptions to follow exclusive content and recommendations. “It’s hard to cut through the clutter on Instagram,” Spackman says. “It’s the same problem that I see on Amazon — the lack of curation. An algorithm can recommend content, but for products it’s a different story.”

In my own shopping habits, I’ve found this to be true — Instagram is good for picking up ideas, but looking back at all the clothes I’ve “saved” for future reference in the app, I rarely go on to buy them. Instead my Instagram shopping is more likely to be one-off second-hand bits of furniture and furnishings. For curated marketplaces, I am equally picky, browsing more often than buying, but I return to them in the way I might go to a deli rather than the supermarket, for the feeling that someone with good taste has conquered overwhelming choices for you.

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