One Kings Lane: Q3 Sales Up 500 Percent; ‘We’re Not Afraid Of Gilt’

Flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe have proven to not only be a popular e-commerce experience, but also a profitable business model. In fact, Gilt is on track to hit $450 million in revenue this year, with rumors of an IPO swirling. But while Gilt pioneered clothing and accessory-focused flash sales, One Kings Lane entered the space last year as one of the first sites to go after the home goods market.

Launched in April of 2009, One Kings Lane runs brand- and theme-specific sales, at least two to three per day, five days a week. During the 72-hour window that items are on sale, members have can move to purchase limited quantity of hand-selected home goods products at significantly reduced prices. Luxury items range from Ralph Lauren home accessories, to Missoni towels to Frette sheets.

Founded by Alison Gelb Pincus (the wife of Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus) and Susan Feldman, One Kings Lane raised an undisclosed amount of funding from led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, First Round Capital and angel investor Reid Hoffman last December.

However, as other flash sales site, such as Gilt and Ideeli; have entered the luxury home goods vertical, One Kings Lane is now facing a considerable amount of competition to the space. But Pincus doesn’t seem to be to worried about the added players in the arena and tells me that she welcomes the challenge of competing with Gilt in the home goods space.

Pincus and Feldman just brought on a new CEO Doug Mack, a seasoned e-commerce exec. Mack co-founded Scene7, a rich media platform provider for the e-commerce industry, which was eventually sold to Adobe. The site has also added Tastemaker Tag Sales, which allows renown interior designers to create curated sales of items that reflect their style. Mack tells me that these sales are meant to give users fresh content and design inspiration from professionals. And for designers, Tastemaker Tag sales are an opportunity to draw attention to their brand and style.

And One Kings Lane is seeing significant growth. Q3 sales are up 561 percent year over year and the site is seeing high loyalty from consumers, with more than 50% of customers as repeat purchasers. One Kings Lane is now getting into other verticals and will be launching food category in the near future.

It should be interesting to see how One Kings Lane continues to compete with challengers like Gilt. One way the startup could drive traffic is via partnerships with retail stores. Gilt just launched a sale with Target to feature the store’s designer-created home goods and fashions. While One Kings Lane would want to retain its focus on the luxury home goods market, a deal with stores like Restoration Hardware or Design Within Reach could be a good fit.

Regardless, the flash sales model for e-commerce is here to stay and One Kings Lane is proving that vertical-focused sites can grow in the crowded space.


“Stop being weak.” An Interview with Angelo Sotira, CEO of deviantART.com (TCTV)

This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is the CEO of deviantART.

One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful.

Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. I think that’s pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don’t know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that’s about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that’s a very long time.

DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. That too is pretty damn cool.  Today on Alexa it has a US traffic rank of 104, making it one of the country’s highest trafficked sites. And yet what’s interesting is that people think of them as being small. Maybe that’s the charm and what’s so special about their site for artists – it doesn’t feel large.

During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. DevaintART was originally formed during an era where there was no such thing as a social network. Their artist profile pages, ability to add friendships and commenting system was new and filled an amazing market need for people to connect, share and sell their works. Sotira’s inspiration came from the early days of creating a site for Winamp skins. Their artists made other forms of art such as paintings and were looking for a digital home. Ten years later, you have one of the largest and most vibrant community-driven art sites online.

What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? For one thing, don’t be weak. He feels that the new crop of entrepreneurs has it a lot easier than he did and needs to do more with very little. He also feels that his generation built platforms while the new generation will be all about marketing, creating the most powerful generation of marketers the world has ever seen.

The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane. How cool is that?



I Need Content Fast : 15 Hours For 100 Words.

I need 1 x 1000 words of original content( I will check with copyscape) written.

I will send you the 1 keyword to write about….

The right person…:

• Writes FLUENT English – this is very important, native writers preferred, non natives don’t waste your time, don’t try to lie me your are a native because I can tell if your are not from your writing style.

I want quality articles… I repeat, please do not bid unless you can provide quality articles.

WordPress Custom Using Smell Like Facebook Theme

Hello All,

I’m back again with another project.

This time I have made a custom design for WordPress. Attached you will find the design that will be used. You can also find the theme that will be used here: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/smells-like-facebook

I need my custom design integrated with all the functions of the “Smells Like Facebook” theme. You can also see in the design, that there will be the need for integrating the Facebook “Like” button and the “Connect with Facebook” button. Must be familiar with this type of programming.

Please submit your best quotes and time frames. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Good Luck,
Carlos

Joomla Registration From Redirect

I am setting up a website that when the customer first comes to the website they will have to fill out the joomla registration form or any form. I will need the form to redirect them based on their zip code to one of the 15 subdomains I’ve created using joomla. I’ll also need their registration information sent over to the database the corresponds with the joomla subdomain.

I know this is probably pretty straightforward. If you have any other suggestions that might work better or questions please let me know. I know for you programmers this should be a pretty easy job. Budget is limited.

Flash Designer Workk 2

I have a flash app. I’m willing to pay $125-200 for this work. I need it done in 20 days or less. I usually pick some quickly. So respond to emails today.

Some changes need to be made to it.

Later you will need to implement it into the oscommerce site I have. You will get some help with my programmer doing this. Basically the person on the oscommerce end clicks on design lab after selecting their type of product (this is all on the oscommerce side and not related to you), but you will have to call up what type of product they select. Whether it be a mug, shirt, jacket etc.
…

After a design has been made you will need it to be saved in a database and moved back over to the cart area on the oscommerce side of the site. This will be done by you but my programmer will help you out.

Remember since you are saving items and pics you will need create a database to save them in or use the existing one for the main site.

My app is located here http://www.2kcompu(remove_this)tersolutions.com/donsflash.

Now that beginning part where you see you have 4 itemas to choose from shirt, mug, etc wont’ be there. It’s just for testing purposes.

Here are the OTHER changes I need done:

1. Be able to change and do work on the back of the shirt or product
2. Changes to the front side should be saved automatically if the person wants to move to the backside of the shirt and start making design changes there.
3. Fix Remove. It shoudl remove all items 1 by 1. So say they put in 10 designs on the front side of the shirt. Clicking remove once will remove the last item placed on the shirt. Clicking it again will remove the item placed before that. Just like undo in microsoft word.
4. Undo All should remove eveything
5. Bold, Italic, and Outlined need to work right
6. Fix the bugs in the rotate function.
7. Fix the issue that happens when you press Add/Edit text then click back on Add/Edit Graphic. It lowers the color box and is pushed up for some reason.
8. Knockout white This option will take out all instances of white in the picture and make them clear. So for example if you have a yellow smiley face you want to put on a blue tshirt. say that yellow smiley face has a white mouth and white eyes. The knockout function will remove that white in the image so it’s basically clearly and you see through to the shirt behind the yellow image. So again it’s like a yellow smiley face on a blue shirt, but the eyes and mouth will be blue as they are clear and the blue is the blue color of the shirts. Supposedly a good example of that is here http://www.techn(remove_this)ologo.com/newtl/oneClickEmbeddedView.jsp?accid=82314801783431&sku=COOLERmax&imid=&styleid=886518&techid=119738&langid=en&wo=1&ver=&verLevel2=&rnd=37
9. The image and text need to be able to skewed and almost rounded for objects like mugs
10 . SAVE/LOAD your design – Visitor should be able to save their design for later
and be able to pull it back up and apply it to another product. Allow them to stay there for 14 days.
11. You should be able to save the image in many formats, such a jpg, png, pdf, etc.
12 . Add design to cart – Clicking this should send the artwork, and the visitor, to the
cart for checkout. The art should come to us as the “Art Board” not the preview.
13. Add in dummy images (front and back) of each product for testing purposes.
14. Some text needs to be move up and centered a little.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
These are all the changes I can think of that need to be made. There may be some small changes that also need to be made and the client may want some other changes made to the app when he reviews it. These likely also will be very small. By accepting the project you agree to do these changes.

Membership / Document Storage Website

I have been asked to get a quote for a membership website where people can sign up for a private account and store personal information, pictures and documents.

The site is to be simple but professional and above all – useful.

It will need to:

– have the ability of users to connect with others in their same general vicinity (by zip or postal code, or by group).

– have the ability for users to fill out a form and request info from suppliers and service providers.

– have the ability for admin to target display/classified advertising to user accounts

– have a blog/news section managed by admin, as well as a knowledge-base section.

This site will need to be developed and then tweaked over time so we are looking for a programmer that will develop the basic site and then be available for updates and modifications. There is probably an out-of-the box solution for this with plug-ins/modlules, however this must appear to be custom coded and not “out of the box”.

NOTICE: DO NOT BID if you are uncomfortable doing it for the budget requested. You will not get the work if you overbid so don’t even attempt to try. Also please do not send lists of websites you have done that are not relevant to this project.

Buyer will provide programmer with all information needed for this project along with some exisiting samples of similar sites that offer similar services.

We will escrow 1/3 of the project amount (unless we feel comfortable escrowing more), and will deposit funds as things progress.

High Quality Banner

I need someone to design a banner for my new joomla site. This banner is “rotating” javascript, so it’s actually like there are 2 or 3 banners. Creating 2 banners will include:
* Artistic creation of the concepts (cars on a US highway, “everyday” looking scene; and an older couple both reading newspapers comfortably)
* possibly collaging two or three images together
* sizing appropriately to the banner size
* installation on my website.

I will need several revisions of each banner to ensure the proper concept and quality is achieved!

WordPress Menu Editor Clone

I am looking to replicate the functionality and look of the new wordpress drag and drop menu editor.

One modification required. I wish to be able to dictate the number of menu levels. So in some instances, I will wish there to be no submenus, or sometimes will allow infinite submenus. This should be set in a javascript variable.

If it can be taken directly from wordpress, that would be great. This includes the functionality to add pages on the fly and external links etc.

Must be totally independent of wordpress i.e. function on a standalone html page.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Custom Tinymce Text Editor

Modifications required for the TinyMCE WYSIWYG for use on a website.

The attached PDF has a quick walkthrough of the modifications. As well as a visual customisation to the editor, there will be amends made to the “insert image” and “link” functionality plus the addition of “insert video” functionality. mcegooglemap should also be implemented in this new style.

Please review the attached PDF and let me know if you have any questions.

One should be able to create multiple instances on a page, and create instances on the fly using jquery. All js should be done using jquery rather than any other library.