Convenience has been the backbone of e-commerce and the pandemic only served as a reinforcement of this tenet. It’s been said that the pandemic accelerated e-commerce innovation and tech adoption by at least five years. Brands and retailers are now looking for new ways to attract, engage, convert, and satisfy customers; VR is the next frontier. 75% of global decision-makers believe that interacting with customers in the metaverse will be commonplace. Emperia is a platform that allows brands and retailers to create immersive and scalable virtual experiences. The platform allows companies to simulate the physical shopping experience with live tour and chat capabilities while also providing an ultra-personalized shopping experience that lends itself to storytelling without boundaries. Emperia is seamlessly integrated and is supported on all platforms without downloads or installations required, whether it be laptops, tablets, phones, or VR devices. Companies can design experiences that are interchangeable between physical and virtual realities by just uploading product photos and descriptions with drop-and-drag functionality. Emperia is currently working with leading brands and retailers like Lacoste, Harrods, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, and Bloomingdales to deliver the next generation of social commerce.
London TechWatch caught up with Emperia Cofounder and CEO Olga Dogadkina to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding raised to $10.7M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise? Was it seed, Series A, B, etc?
Series A, $10M, led by Base10, joined by Daphni (via its retail fund Dastore), Sony Innovation Fund, Background Capital, Stanford Capital Partners, and Concept Ventures. Angels include Blissgrowth’s Jay Radia.
Tell us about your product or service.
The Emperia platform powers the creation and management of immersive virtual experiences for brands across multiple retail sectors. The platform marries the reach and accessibility of e-commerce with the impact of physical customer service shopping experience, while leveraging the unique traits of the virtual space; adding a layer of customer engagement, personalization, data monitoring, and omnichannel cohesion.
What inspired the start of Emperia?
I founded Emperia with Simonas Holcmann in 2019. The inspiration for the business came from when I previously worked in the luxury retail sector. During this time, it became clear that whilst e-commerce was the future of retail, 2D websites were merely a tool that enabled an online purchase, through a simple grid of images and text, but lacked the customer journey, story-telling and the ability to provide the customer experience and product discovery retailers’ physical stores strive to achieve.
Simonas and I launched Emperia to bridge the gap between the transactional nature of an e-commerce purchase and the personalized shopping experience brands can cultivate in store. Using technology, Emperia aims to make virtual worlds into the future of e-commerce, expanding the reach to new and future online shoppers, increasing brand loyalty, and creating a complete new shopping experience.
How is it different?
Emperia’s in-house SaaS platform is the first of its kind and integrates into any existing e-commerce and stock management platform. This provides retailers with full creative control over the metaverse space they create and how their products are showcased within them.
Emperia’s data suite then tracks demographics, store activity, and purchases, allowing retailers to analyze and optimize their virtual store performance. Utilizing historical data, Emperia continues to improve space layouts and user experience, optimizing these towards better experience flow and improved KPIs.
The platform has driven increased conversion rates for its brand partners by an average of 73% (vs. regular e-commerce websites) since its inception in 2019, with an average ROI of 750%
What market are you targeting and how big is it?
Retailers across multiple sectors, globally. Currently working with the likes of Bloomingdale’s, Dior, Lacoste, Sunglass Hut and many others.
What’s your business model?
Saas, base fee+subscription
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
The pandemic definitely accelerated awareness amongst retailers of what immersive, tech-powered e-commerce experiences could do and the role they could play in their sales strategy. We saw this boost demand amongst luxury names early on in the pandemic and the demand has now expanded to high street retailers.
What we’ve seen during 2022 is a maturing demand for virtual worlds, following the earlier buzz, partially contributed to by the entrance of major technology players such as Meta. The earlier marketing hype, which was campaign-dependent, short-lived virtual space has now become a permanent, long-term e-commerce solution, which is treated as a ‘flagship virtual store’. Retailers are much more experienced, with specific roles within those organizations specializing and overseeing the creation and maintenance of these spaces, with the understanding that the virtual store is a completely new experience, different to the physical store environment, which presents a true opportunity to expand the brand’s appeal to the shoppers of the future.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the cheque?
Luci Fonseca of Base10 Partners:
“When we met Olga and Simon, we were absolutely stunned by the high-quality team they had already built and the business’ early traction. The more we spoke to customers, the more we saw that Emperia is on the edge of a global revolution on how consumers interact with retailers and brands. One way to think about Emperia is through the lens of ‘web 2.5’—it is a device-agnostic bridge for brands to engage with a new generation of consumers while driving real commerce. Emperia is pioneering the development of virtual store creation and maintenance, and we’re excited to be partnering with a team that is truly building for the future of e-commerce.”
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will use this fresh funding to supercharge our virtual store SaaS platform and deepen the capabilities of the data suite that powers it, expand our global reach, enter new retail verticals and grow our team to support these new operations.
We also plan to leverage unique virtual store customer data to provide retailers with even better tools with which to personalize and enrich the customer experience.
In addition, Emperia will be investing in expanding its platform approach, which will introduce new Web3 capabilities and functionality by leveraging the fast-growing Web3 ecosystem and its partners’ complementary technologies to deliver game-changing customer experiences that yield the future of online retail.
Emperia will be investing in expanding its platform approach, which will introduce new Web3 capabilities and functionality by leveraging the fast-growing Web3 ecosystem and its partners’ complementary technologies to deliver game-changing customer experiences that yield the future of online retail.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We will be focusing on market expansion, reaching new retail sectors and further-developing our retail store platform and data suite.
