First of all, the company is no longer called the Daily Grommet. Now it’s just The Grommet.
“We still execute daily,” says CEO Jules Pieri, “but we dropped the word because it seemed to be superfluous.” She adds, “We love what ‘grommet’ represents, a humble piece of hardware that makes things better.”
The company’s mission? To feature interesting, undiscovered products on its website, tell the stories behind their makers, and help get them out into the world.
The news this week is that Lexington, MA-based Grommet has a new majority owner—Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten—thanks to an unspecified new investment. Rakuten led the startup’s Series B round last September, and Grommet also has raised about $6 million in angel investment ($4.4 million paid in capital).
And next month, the startup—which has grown from 10 to 43 employees in the past year or so—will move into new digs right on the Cambridge-Somerville border, near Davis Square. Its new mailing address will be in Somerville to reflect “more of a hacker/maker community,” Pieri says.
All of which is to say, this is a good time to step back and think about Grommet’s greater journey—and, in particular, its significance to a world of online commerce traditionally dominated by big players.
Pieri co-founded the startup, her third, in 2008 along with Joanne Domeniconi. An industrial designer by training, Pieri wanted to build a business around helping small products and companies compete for distribution in a world of big-box retailers and Amazon.com (hold that thought). She calls the approach “citizen commerce,” and it’s a mix of online marketing, curating, storytelling, and video, all centered around changing the culture of how and why people buy stuff.
“We reveal the people behind the company and what they care about,” she says. “On our site, you can search by values. You’re not necessarily shopping by price or requirements, you’re shopping by what kind of world you want to live in.”
That might sound idealistic, but Grommet has built up some scale now. In addition to the typical hot-startup growth chart—roughly 400 percent growth in revenues and customers in the past year—Pieri (pictured) says the firm has “more vendor relationships than Walmart and more suppliers than Ford Motor,” to use the parlance of the big guys. (Grommet calls its suppliers “partners.”)
On the new ownership front, what Rakuten brings is a large, established online marketplace, logistical expertise, international product sourcing, and key relationships with companies like Pinterest (in which Rakuten is an investor).
The Japanese firm also shares an important bit of culture with Grommet. “They’ve been working away at the same mission for 15 years,” Pieri says. “The humanizing experience of commerce, connecting you to merchants.” She relays an experience in Tokyo a few weeks ago: she was shopping at an open market and met a stand owner peddling nuts; she found out that the owner does more than $300,000 a month in sales on Rakuten.
And while Grommet’s mission hasn’t changed, it does need to serve its new master. “Our role in life is to discover and curate the best ideas and products out there, and help them scale,” Pieri says. “We de-risk them to help them move forward to Rakuten’s store” and other large retailers.
Rakuten is sometimes referred to as the “Amazon of Japan.” But it sells itself culturally as the opposite of Amazon. “Rakuten doesn’t undermine its partners,” Pieri says. “A lot of our vendors have a problem with Amazon.”
She’s talking about the Seattle e-commerce giant’s tendency to “watch what sells on their platform and then undercut them.” There’s nothing wrong with competing on price, of course, but Amazon does seem to rub a lot of smaller retailers the wrong way.
For Grommet and others, it boils down to a
