Grabble On-The-Go Fashion App Swipes Up $1.8M

The British fashion app Grabble, which uses Tinder-style swipes to help customers make fashion purchases from retailers, just landed a $1.8 million fundraising round from a series of angel investors, as the company seeks to expand to the U.S. and Asia within the year.

“Our aim is to launch in the U.S. by the summer, but we are also looking East, having strategically taken investment from influential angel investors from Asia and the U.S. that could assist us in these exciting markets where mobile usage is growing so fast,” said co-founder Joel Freeman in The Telegraph on Feb. 20.

Grabble has been stylized as the “Tinder for fashion,” as users swipe right to add items to a cart. The app is free to use, and is financed by retail outlets buying service packages ranging from $84 for a “bronze” package to a $300 “gold” package, according to the company’s retailer information. A basic package covers the ability for users to share collections with social media, managing sales alerts and exclusive deals as well as customized brand pages, while more expensive plans (particularly the $146 “silver” plan, which the company is aggressively promoting) include notifications of brand activity, prominent placement within the app, promotion of specific collections, and even Grabble managing the account for the brand (only available with the “gold” membership).

Grabble has thus far registered 50,000 users “grabbing” over 450,000 products from 2,000 websites including Uniqlo, Topshop, Zara, and Urban Outfitters, marking a difference between them and exclusively high-fashion retail apps like Moda Operandi, or fashion rental apps like Le Tote or Rent the Runway. The high hit rates made it the No. 7 iOS app in the Lifestyle Free section at one point, and is in the Top 10 across 138 countries.

The app drove over 300,000 clicks within 14 days, enough to allegedly cause a few websites to crash due to the traffic. Grabble also touts its industry leading purchase conversion rates, at 4 percent compared to generic search functions like Bing (3.03 percent) and Google (1.71 percent), noting that it’s catering to a “purchase-focused” audience which is more prone to take advantage of exclusive deals and promotions if advertised on the app, providing an m-commerce platform that has in the past stumped big-name retailers looking to venture out on their own.