Purple Dot has raised £1.35 million seed funding.
The London firm bills itself as a ‘worth-the-wait payment option for fashion brands’.
Founded in August 2019 by Skyscanner employees Madeline Parra (CEO) and John Talbott (CTO), Purple Dot is helping fashion brands tackle wasted inventory, drastic sales tactics, and the profit erosion that comes with it.
The seed round was led by Connect Ventures with support from AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList, Vijay Pandurangan (ex-Twitter), Alex Roetter, former SVP of Engineering at Twitter, and the family office of Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com.
Its model allows consumers to request a ‘worth-the-wait’ lower price and, in return, retailers may then decide whether or not to release a product mid-season at a slightly reduced rate.
Customers pay up front and then wait to have the item confirmed, receiving a full refund if not.
The Purple Dot payment method sits alongside ‘buy now, pay later’ finance options, but does not look to drag consumers into unsustainable debt.
The company is currently working with a variety of small boutiques across the country and is in discussions with a number of major UK and US high street brands. The first major brand to partner with Purple Dot will be menswear retailer SPOKE, an integration which is likely to go live in November.
“When shopping online today, customers can either pay the retail price or walk away,” said CEO Parra.
“When they do walk away, the item goes through the discounting process, becomes unprofitable for the merchant and is resigned to landfill.
“This binary system isn’t working for anyone – the customer loses out on the item, because it may go out of stock in their size before they attempt to purchase it again, and the merchant loses the sale.
“Purple Dot tackles this problem head on by providing a new way to shop, taking on unsustainable, unrelenting consumerism, poor pricing tactics and profit-crunching sales at the same time.”