Please welcome Uppercase, a turnkey brick-and-mortar solution for digitally native brands
Meet Uppercase, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York, NY
Cofounders: Adam Bent, Jeffrey Ling, Yashar Nejati
The problem: When brands reach $10 million in sales it becomes more cost effective to acquire customers in a real-world store than through online advertising. Increasingly, data shows that customers acquired in the real-world have deeper brand affinity and higher lifetime spend. However, launching retail is risky and complex, and has so far meant sacrificing data when taking things offline.
Uppercase’s solution: Uppercase is a modern retail solution helping brands launch stores from the ground up. It uses data to inform business decisions such as where each store should be, what times it should be open, and merchandising. Uppercase offers everything a brand needs to launch, measure, and scale its retail presence.
Origin story: The first Uppercase store was built for Yashar’s first company, a CPG food brand. Surprised by the existing barriers in real estate, he built a new marketplace for short-term rentals. Uppercase was created to offer more than a physical location for digitally native brands. It de-risks retail, offering 5,000 brands and counting a turnkey solution to power their retail growth.
Why we’re betting on it: We’ve backed a lot of digitally native direct-to-consumer brands and we’ve seen the importance of an omnichannel strategy as companies scale. Uppercase offers brands a quick-start solution for launching brick-and-mortar stores, using data to inform everything from where to set up shop to the technology powering and optimizing customer experience. Uppercase is the perfect partner for brands born online looking to expand into the physical world.
Our take: The size of the global market for consumer products is enormous at $9 trillion. Direct-to-consumer companies are primed to disrupt this area, but first they need to move some operations offline to provide an enhanced experience for existing customers and to find new ones. Uppercase makes this transition into the real-world seamless by using data to make smart decisions in place of guesswork. Any brand born online, looking to set up a physical shop, can tap into Uppercase’s wealth of resources to bring their concept to life.
Further reading: “Uppercase raises $3.5M to help e-tailers open brick-and-mortar stores” via TechCrunch
