Think along the lines of TheRealReal. Jetzt auf Deutsch! Now shift overseas and to a new — and the 100th — equity crowdfunding campaign launched by Companisto.
German-speaking Prelovee’s secondhand market consists of more than 100 online and over 1000 offline stores filled with unique items… and inherent fragmented and nontransparent nature. Pre-valued at €1,300,000, Prelovee has set €400,000 as its funding goal for 23.53% equity, having already raised more than €21,800 from 51 investors in its first day. €100 is the minimum investment.
Founded by Stephanie Neumann and Swantje Pawlitschek who have backgrounds in finance (Google & EY) and marketing/sales (Campari & LLOYD), Prelovee was part of Batch #1 of the Next Commerce Accelerator, a finalist of the Breakthrough 2018 award and winner of the Munich Business Plan Competition Phase 1. Neumann and Pawlitschek are also mentors of SAP’s Next Gen mentoring for female founders.
[clickToTweet tweet=”In Mode: 100th @companisto Equity #Crowdfunding Campaign @PreloveeFashion” quote=”In Mode: 100th @companisto Equity #Crowdfunding Campaign @PreloveeFashion”]
Munich-based Prelovee aims to solves this problem with a meta-search engine and have already acquired more than 30 online partners, offering a combined amount of more than 1.5 million products on its site. The fashion platform wants to become the first point of contact for secondhand fashion and is reportedly already generating over EUR 40,000 organic monthly external sales.
“After three months of development, Prelovee entered the market with a minimum viable product (MVP) in 2016. This means that Prelovee launched a product with minimum viability and continued to develop the site on the basis of user feedback and the connection of additional online partners. In the summer of 2017, we completed the development of the crawler, which makes it possible to integrate online partners who do not have this technical possibility themselves. Prelovee also relaunched the website design in autumn 2017 in order to make it more attractive to visitors, to advance search engine optimization, and to improve the search experience for visitors,” according to the campaign. “Prelovee’s book Live & Love Secondhand will be published in May. Our goal for 2018 is the SaaS integration of the stationary secondhand market. Internationalization is to begin in 2019 and a mobile app will be developed in order to respond even more specifically to the increasing use of the Internet via mobile devices.”
A comparison to online partners based on internal Prelovee research shows that the customer saves time (>80%) by using this search engine, receives transparent price comparison options (up to 60% savings compared to online partners), and has access to an integrated product portfolio.
Munich-based business angel Cali Ventures GmbH led Prelovee’s first financing round; the startup’s second financing round saw the entry of the Next Commerce Accelerator (NCA) from Hamburg. The NCA consists of investors such as Haspa, Edeka, and Beiersdorf.
According to Companisto, the German platform’s success has been bolstered by the investments of more than 83,482 people who crowdfunded nearly €50M. Crowdfund Insider reached out to the platform for further comment and awaits exciting updates.
“What we see on Companisto is that equity crowdfunding is increasingly going hand-in-hand with co-investments by business angels, venture capitalists, or public investment funds. Today’s success is the result of a relationship characterized by trust between investors, startups, and our innovative platform and investment services,” Companisto Managing Director Tamo Zwinge shared with Crowdfund Insider. “This also affects the German investment market, where equity crowdfunding plays an important role in seed and early-stage financing overall. Considering all this, we are proud to start the 100th campaign on Companisto last week. Adding up the number of investment rounds, we are the most active private investor in Germany for the past three consecutive years. And we are not stopping here.”
Have a crowdfunding offering you'd like to share? Submit an offering for consideration using our Submit a Tip form and we may share it on our site!