After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with friends and family, Kristine Locker launched her own social shopping platform to organize her endless tabs into a shareable, virtual wish list.
Locker, the “Pinterest for online shopping,” launched in 2022 as a Chrome extension and lets you save any online product into wish lists, discover outfit collages by other users, collaborate with friends, and create giftable collections to share via email or social media. It has an iOS app.
Locker revealed today that Wonder Ventures invested $2.5 million at a $9 million value in it.
“Kristine Locker has figured out something that Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook have all tried and failed to nail down,” Wonder Ventures’ Valentina Rodriguez told Eltrys. “Socialization revolves around shopping, not vice versa. Because she has the ideal founder/product match, she has established a platform that makes socialized commerce user-friendly and viral.
Locker is for average users who want to construct shoppable collections for fun, unlike influencer-focused platforms like LTK, Collective Voice, and Split.
“Upon reviewing the market, I noticed platforms designed for influencers… Locker’s creator told us that none of it met my requirement to organize my purchasing and have an organic area where I could see what my peers were buying, which is what I needed. One of [Locker’s] goals is to develop a user-generated genuine sharing platform without monetization so you don’t feel like, ‘Oh, someone’s sharing something with me because they can make money off of it.’”
Instead of earning money by promoting Locker things, join their “Shopping Club” to be paid when friends use your referral link. If you recommend 25 Locker users, you earn unique stuff. The startup’s creator says 500 customers earn $750 to buy a Locker outfit.
Locker makes money by collaborating with companies via affiliate networks. Locker’s average commission rate is 12%, but it may reach 25% depending on brand exposure.
“We remove brands that don’t play in the affiliate space from the discovery page to keep it fair for participating brands,” Locker explains.
Two years before, Locker user and higher-education consultant Cabell Hickman, highlighted in The Wall Street Journal for her $6 million portfolio, put $1 million in the firm. Former Honey executive Chris Arreguin, Elizabeth Egan (Breakaway Ventures), Maggie Sellers (HSR Ventures), Kira Jackson (Rx3 Growth Partners), Alex Doman (AVEC Drinks), and AWS senior strategy manager of global startups Tariro Makoni are among the investors.
Locker claims 80,000 monthly users.
Locker creates virtual wish lists and collages from retail URLs.
