Shopping is fun, but choosing a set of skis from thousands of options is not. That's where Remark comes in.
Remark co-founder and CEO Theo Satloff said the two-year-old startup is helping shoppers make purchases with more confidence.
It does this by pairing shoppers with high-quality product experts via asynchronous live chat with one of its 50,000 experts – artists, musicians, stylists, golfers and ski instructors – who can discuss products in the same way they would with retail staff.
And here's a little twist: Remark trains artificial intelligence models on these experts, creating personas that can answer questions in a human style. This way, the “experts” are always available even if they're not physically there. Remark pays its human experts a cut of every sale made through its platform.
Having both human and AI personas allows the 45 brands already using Remark to leverage blog posts and landing pages optimized for individual shoppers, not just experts. Become. The company receives a small commission on the revenue attributed to Remark. There are no platform fees and the company will share the profits.
“Our goal is to be their best direct guide through all of their e-commerce experiences,” Satlof said.
Satloff and co-founders Ian Patterson and Carl-Philip Majgaard initially thought that most use cases would be big-ticket purchases like skis. But realizing that shopping is emotional, regardless of price, customers now use his Remark for almost every purchase, including socks.
In the case of Darn Tough Socks, Remark experts spoke to tens of thousands of customers and engaged in hundreds of thousands of interactions, all of which were related to sock purchases.
“For us, this was an eye-opening moment because it showed us that even a fairly low-cost purchase is something we make with great consideration and emotion. ,” Satloff said.
An example of Remark's asynchronous chat technology working with Embr's wearable site. (Image provided by: Remark)
Remark currently works with clients in the outdoor industry, baby products, and beauty and skincare who have seen a 9% increase in revenue and a 30% conversion rate, which Satloff called “amazing.”
He likens it to a brick-and-mortar experience: once a customer walks into a store, the retailer has about a 30% chance of converting that customer into a buyer.
“Brands are looking at their websites as the new flagship experience and they need to have the same kind of great, easy-to-follow guides on their websites that they have in their brick-and-mortar stores,” he said.
Remark's expert shopping uses AI based on past purchases, pioneered by companies like Amazon and Intercom with AI-first customer service, and startups like Shoptrue for fashion and Halla for groceries. It goes a step further than the base algorithm guide.
While some of these services focus on post-sale customer service, Remark focuses on pre-sale decision support and guidance, Satloff said.The company also has an advantage in that it owns the community, allowing Remark to perpetually generate new data and instantly generate new data as needed.
“We are spearheading this persona-based model building, which is literally pioneering new techniques and new approaches to role-playing and using multiple models at once. That means there are,” Satloff said.
To continue developing its product and technology, Remark recently raised $10.3 million in seed funding from a group of investors including Spero Ventures, Stripe, Shine Capital, Neo, Sugar Capital and Visible Ventures, as well as angel investors including Dave Habiger, CEO of JD Power and chairman of Reddit, Jeff Barnett, former CEO of Demandware/CommerceCloud, and Varsha Rao, former CEO of Nurx.