Play Fetch: Redefining the Shopping Rewards Experience
Story by Yoonkee Sull, Ritika Pai and Greg Stanger
Fetch was founded in 2012 by Wes Schroll on a simple premise: “Why isn’t earning rewards on everyday purchases easier?” Then a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison grocery shopping for himself for the first time, Wes became frustrated with the traditional ways of saving money on groceries — clipping coupons, searching for deals, signing up and tracking loyalty programs across retailers… He founded Fetch to give power back to the consumer and reward people for purchasing from brands they love across any retailer by simply snapping a photo of their receipts. After securing funding in a variety of start-up competitions, Wes dropped out of school to focus full-time on Fetch.
Today, Fetch offers rewards on thousands of products in dozens of categories across hundreds of household brands. Since inception, more than 780 million receipts have been scanned by millions of consumers who have given the app more than 1 million 5-star reviews, representing incredible engagement and broad-based adoption. The app has helped consumers save millions of dollars by enabling them to redeem points for gift cards at their favorite brands and realize savings that have helped families, particularly during this pandemic.
Just as importantly, with the rapid shift to digital, the team recognized the need for CPG brands, which rely heavily on third-party retail channels to sell product, to better understand the efficacy of their trade spend dollars and establish direct relationships with their consumers. CPG brands spend up to ~20% of their retail sales on trade every year. However, these dollars are traditionally spent inefficiently as the data is opaque, attribution is weak and the resulting ROI is unclear. In parallel, many household brands have built their own digital loyalty programs to get closer to their customers, but they have often struggled to achieve scaled success as they are siloed.
Fetch captures purchase behavior across payment methods, retail channels and offline and online shopping. With a hyper-engaged and rapidly growing user base, we believe Fetch is uniquely positioned to be the digital partner to brands looking to more measurably spend their trade budget, influence purchases and gain visibility into the lifetime value of their customers.
Fetch helps CPG brands leverage numerous strategies within the app — engaging new buyers, rewarding loyal customers, trialing new products and promoting adjacent products, among many others. In fact, long-time brand partner Huggies recently shuttered its own standalone app and is creating a full rewards experience within Fetch and migrating its users over to Fetch. In turn, consumers are shown more relevant offers and products than they are on any other service. Put together, Fetch has built a two-sided marketplace delivering tangible value to both sides and has grown at an incredible rate over the last few years.
Now with the core engine humming, the company has ambitions to tackle numerous exciting opportunities on top of continuing to strengthen its main product. This year, the team has had a major focus on enabling consumers to scan and get rewarded for all — not just grocery — receipts, including restaurants, hardware and apparel, which significantly expands an already large market opportunity. The Fetch team is working very hard on several new initiatives that are just as relevant and large in scope, and we look forward to sharing more with the world as they come to fruition.
Lastly and most importantly, we believe Wes is an exceptional leader and has built an incredible team. We had the fortune of building a relationship with Wes over the last year and saw him lay out his vision and execute very successfully against various milestones. But how he did it all stood out most to us — with transparency, speed, inclusion, focus, resilience and trust.
Right before the onset of COVID-19 in the US, one of our last flights was to Madison, where we met with the broader management team. It was easy to see how each leader complemented one another, and their excitement to build a defining consumer platform was contagious. And we believe it has shown. We have been impressed by how quickly the team came together to adjust to the current climate and emerge from the crisis even stronger than before.
We are incredibly excited to have led Fetch’s Series C financing and welcome the team to the ICONIQ Growth portfolio. In Fetch we see a team, a product, partnerships and a vision to become a globally leading shopping app, and we look forward to supporting Fetch in defining the next chapter in commerce. As Wes says, it feels we are still at the starting line!
