Wantable, the fast-growing Milwaukee e-commerce startup focused on young women’s fashion, said it has closed a $1.5 million Series A funding round that will help it grow the business and expand its product lines.
The money comes from undisclosed Wisconsin and California investors. Wantable, founded in 2012 by Milwaukee serial entrepreneur Jalem Getz, previously raised $800,000 in seed funding, with Getz putting in some of his own money.
Wantable sells young women boxes of makeup, fashion accessories, and intimate apparel based on style profiles generated by customers online. It’s part of a growing group of personalized shopping websites, like Birchbox, Trunk Club (just acquired by Nordstrom), and Stitch Fix, that are jostling for a piece of consumers’ wallets.
“Given our highly personalized, category-specific collections, we feel Wantable.com is well-positioned to become one of the leaders in the personal styling space,” Getz said in a press release. “Like Trunk Club and Stitch Fix, we combine technology, personal service, and the human touch not found at mass-market online retailers like Amazon or QVC.”
The new money will help Wantable accelerate business growth, develop its technology, and add a fourth product category, fitness apparel, in September.
Wantable’s target customer, Getz said, is a young woman who is ambitious about her career and has a busy schedule, but has some extra cash to treat herself with sophisticated makeup, accessories, and intimate apparel. She’s also serious about keeping fit.
“We know who our customer is,” Getz told Xconomy. “Maybe after work she goes for a bike ride or does yoga or works out at the gym. We want to be with her every hour of the day.”
Getz is one of Milwaukee’s more prolific serial entrepreneurs. He is best-known locally for co-founding BuySeasons, the online retailer and distributor of costumes and party supplies that he co-founded in 1999 and helped grow to $170 million in annual revenue. He sold the company in 2006 for an undisclosed sum and stayed on as CEO until 2010.
Getz wouldn’t share specific revenue or customer numbers for Wantable, but he said it has grown faster in its first two years than BuySeasons did. Wantable is expanding its staff of 23, but Getz declined to say by how much.
