BCV Leads $35M Investment In soona, Bringing The Ecommerce Photoshoot Into The Cloud
by Scott Friend and Dawit Heck, Bain Capital Ventures
“A more beautiful internet for all!” — Liz Giorgi, Co-Founder, soona
We’re excited today to announce BCV’s investment in soona, bringing the ecommerce photoshoot into the cloud. With today’s vast number of ecommerce choices, it’s getting harder and harder for retailers and brands to attract and retain new customers. As the cost of getting a customer to an online storefront skyrockets, ecommerce sellers really need to bank on ensuring those clicks end up converting.
That’s why brands are eager to use top-quality visual content in their marketing campaigns and on their product pages; after all, if your products don’t jump off the page for customers, you have almost no chance of driving a purchase.
It’s that backdrop that explains why we’ve been so focused on tools that help sellers sell more effectively, and why we’re so excited to lead the recent $35M Series B round for soona, on its way to becoming the de facto visual content creation platform for all of ecommerce.
As Liz Giorgi, CEO and Co-Founder of soona, often notes, there is not a single physical good bought on the internet that does not include a visual asset. Anyone who has sold online knows that a high-quality photo or video leads to higher conversion and lower return rates; even a basic pair of white socks sells better with the right images.
With more and more sellers, large and small, coming online, the need for an easy, inexpensive yet high-quality way to add visual images to online stores and marketing campaigns has never been greater.
Before soona, quality photography was certainly available, but typically at a high cost and complexity (find a photographer or agency, schedule a shoot, show up and spend hours at the shoot, pay by the hour [whether you like the output or not]…). Brands have regularly turned to agencies and online labor marketplaces to find freelance photographers — paying up to $1,000 a pop for virtual assets, with little assurance of the quality of the final output.
In today’s exploding ecommerce landscape, brands need a better way to produce high-quality content. Enter soona, enabling brands to create professional content quickly and inexpensively at consistently high quality.
How is this possible, you might ask? By putting the whole process in the cloud! soona has centralized and automated photoshoot operations with top creatives on staff. Marketers collaborate online in real-time with their photographer during the shoot and then choose and pay for just the images they want to use.
The result is extremely high customer satisfaction and best-in-class repeat behavior — in fact, soona’s customer repeat behavior and retention is among the highest of any transaction-oriented business we’ve ever seen!
Here’s how it works:
Not surprisingly, Co-Founders Liz Giorgi and Hayley Anderson are experienced and award-winning veterans in this arena. They have been recognized as innovators in the world of visual content creation and have now brought their talent and vision to the cloud, enabling access to high-quality creative for all.
This new commerce reality includes not just the need for the highest quality visual assets, but also the growing prominence of first-party data, the critical importance of highly personalized interactions, and the requirement for optimized site experiences.
In that emerging market landscape, tools like soona become a necessity, as do the many other commerce-tech leaders in the BCV portfolio, including Persado for highly-personalized and optimized language content; Attentive for delivering those messages via the most personalized channels (SMS); Bloomreach and mParticle for the infrastructure and tools to manage all the first party data; Flow (now part of Global-E, NASDAQ:GLBE) to localize the experience and facilitate the sale to a cross-border global audience; Mirakl to build out third-party marketplaces; Recharge for managing subscription-oriented relationships with customers; Shipbob for handling all of the logistics; and the list goes on.
We’re proud at BCV to have been on the front-end of so many ecommerce trends over the past twenty years, backing best-in-class founders who have literally transformed the commerce landscape for all. And we couldn’t be more excited to begin our partnership with the soona team as they continue to reshape digital content creation for commerce and help create, as Liz often says, “a more beautiful internet for all!”
