Jewlery design and sales startup Chloe and Isabel has just raised a healthy $8.5 million Series A round led by General Catalyst.
This round follows on a $3.25 million in a seed round which the company raised just this January. That round was led by First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, and angel investors including SV Angel Ron Conway, Founder Collectives’ Caterina Fake, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, The Consigliere’s Mike Duda, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, and Ashton Kutcher.
“We’ve been reading a lot about the series A crunch, so it was exciting to share the good news,” Lindsay Kaplan, their marketing director, told Betabeat by phone.
The young company has a interesting business model, which they describe thusly: “The brand conceives, designs and markets its own brand of lifetime-guaranteed fashion jewelry for users to sell, priced from $18 to $200. Chloe + Isabel is also building a platform that will power a user’s own personal e-commerce experience. Users who sign up as Merchandisers receive a customized digital workplace to create their boutique shopping experience, and they earn 30 percent in commission from every sale. Merchandisers may participate in streaming video training, are able to curate personal collections of Chloe+Isabel jewelry on their online boutiques, and receive real-time trends, insights and recommendations to help support their businesses.”
The startup also announced a new partnership with Refinery29 to recruit sellers on nine college campuses and showcase co-ed style on Refinery’s website. “We’re kind of like Avon, we provide the products, the girls do the selling and the social media,” said Ms. Kaplan. “What we’re focused on now is building out the digital dashboard we offer to them so that they can get they most out of the e-commerce business we’re building together.”
