One Kings Lane isn’t just a hot flash commerce site. It’s a hot commerce site that has been backed by Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Reid Hoffman. And cofounder Ali Pincus is married to Mark Pincus of Zynga fame.
The site launched in May 2009 and offers users deeply discounted high end home furnishings via daily sales. Like Groupon most of the inbound traffic comes from daily emails sent out to registered users. And repeat buyers are basically camping out on the site, driving 80% of total orders. The really rabid ones don’t even wait for the email, they just hit the site at 8 am to buy stuff before it sells out.
Revenue is nicely up and to the right, up 500% over last year. New CEO Doug Mack started in May when the company had 30 employees. Today they have 65 and are hiring like crazy.
They’ll announce three new executive hires tomorrow – Ed Komo as vice president of engineering, Jim Liefer as vice president of operations and Yulie Kim as head of product. This group has experience from Walmart.com, eBay and Hotwire…and in the case of Ed, the dreaded Jigsaw.
I’m a customer of One Kings Lane, and have made a few purchases for my new house. They always have really interesting curated stuff for sale at every price range, and they buying process is simple. Like Groupon and Gilt they seem to have found a business model that really works.
It works so well, in fact, that it isn’t out of the question that the Pincus household could have not just one but two IPOs in the coming years – Zynga and One Kings Lane.
Mack is aggressively building out his executive team, he tells me. They are recruiting a VP Marketing and a CFO right now. So if you’re looking, they may be the right fit for you.
