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There was a lot of head scratching in Silicon Valley Wednesday over a $6.3 million investment in Brit + Co., a shopping and crafts site whose traffic has been estimated at around 50,000 unique visitors a month, with the company saying it does somewhere north of 500,000 monthly uniques -- both very modest numbers. That had people wondering if investors like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and New York’s Lerer Ventures backed Brit + Co. because proprietor Brit Morin is married to Path CEO Dave Morin and the recipient of relentlessly glowing media coverage.
Connections almost always are a factor in early tech investments, and it would be foolish to dismiss the importance of Brittany Morin’s relationships. But there is another big reason investors are chasing companies like Brit + Co.: We're in the midst of a mad dash to most profitably redefine how people find and purchase lifestyle products traditionally pushed through glossy magazines and in-store displays.
Morin sits near the center of this effort. Her site is an eclectic hybrid, publishing bloggy product roundups and crafting guides, selling DIY kits, and sending email newsletters. In this it faintly resembles Thrillist Media Group, which runs an entertainment and product reviews blog, publishes a shopping and events newsletter, and runs its own men’s shopping club -- all to the tune of at least $75 million in annual revenue.
It also looks a lot like a bunch of other sites that fuse commerce to media and social networks. There’s Houzz, where asking home remodeling questions and looking at pictures of house interiors leads users down the path toward hiring a contractor. Or Polyvore, where users build, view, and “like” sets of clothes and accessories that can be bought with a single click (affiliate fees helped the profitable company double revenue last year). And of course there’s also Pinterest, the 50-million-user-per-month juggernaut that is still trying to figure out how to connect its trove of user-generated image collections to retail transactions.
Ads on Google and many ads on Facebook are about connecting people to products they’ve already shown some interest in, whether by typing keywords into a search box, mentioning a product in an email, or visiting an e-commerce site. Morin and her cohort are, conversely, about generating that demand in the first place, manufacturing hunger for products you didn’t even know you should want. The potential of that activity was limited in the heyday of retail catalogs and of Morin’s old-media forerunners like Martha Stewart, but the subsequent proliferation in social networks, online media, and e-commerce platforms has lowered barriers around direct sales and promotion and thus expanded the potential upside of convincing a niche group to buy things.
The extent to which investors overestimate the potential of that disruption, not to mention the potential of Morin personally, remains to be seen. But it’s worth pointing out that while Morin is hot right now partly because of who she knows, she's also attracting attention because of where she is trying to stand.
Update: Added Brit + Co. traffic claims. June 27 5:12 pm PT
