Everywalk.com describes itself as a “social retail platform” through which users can build their perfect virtual high street online. In its current incarnation, users bookmark and save items they’ve found on the web, placing them into lifestyle-based categories containing their shopping wish lists. But, says founder Chris Fogg, the app that is being developed will transform Everywalk.com into a new way to shop.
”The next phase is to make it mobile. The app will enable users to seamlessly traverse the physical and virtual realms in a really immersive way. For example, when someone sees something in a shop that they like, they will be able to scan the barcode and add it to whichever lifestyle and ideas section that they’ve created on the app. There might be ‘outdoor pursuits’, ‘new baby’, ‘redecorating’, ‘gym’ etc, and they can build their ideas from there, helping to create a vision for what they are interested in. This is great for shoppers, but also really important for retailers too, because many have wrestled with the challenge of the rising popularity of online shopping vs the actual high street – people still go into shops, but they don’t buy from them as much as they used to. Everywalk.com provides a bridge between the two, encompassing both realms, and retailers are very excited about that.”
Fogg, an art school graduate and brand and advertising man, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi before setting up his own creative agency, says the initial inspiration for Everywalk came from his frustration with trying to find niche or independent retailers when shopping online, “because all the big brands dominate web search pages,”. This annoyance, coupled with difficulty remembering where, or how, to find those more specialist retailers again if you did find them online but did not make an initial purchase, led to the original idea for a bookmarking tool. “That version, the desktop version, of Everywalk.com launched in early 2016 and it has evolved ever since, based on market feedback and our ideas on how to develop it. It was initially a fairly simple bookmarking tool, but with any product, the original idea is rarely the product it becomes. The app is being built now. You will be able to bookmark products you find, online or in shops. That will create a product page in a lifestyle wish list. It also creates a URL and we will monetise that in two ways, from an actual purchase transaction and from the data it creates that allows retailers to engage, in a highly targeted way, with those consumers who are receptive to, interested in, their products.”
“We’ve been through two investment rounds and are about to embark on a third. In the first, we raised about £500,000 in seed investment, £150,000 of which came from SEIS. That first investment allowed us to build the Minimum Viable Product (M.V.P.) and take it to market, and from there we’ve market-tested it, evolved the idea and developed the business model. “Our latest fundraising, which will feature EIS investment is about preparing for scale, so we’ll be bringing some key hires to the team and continuing the app development. “Soon after that, in the next 12 months, we’ll be looking to begin the Series A fundraising round and coming to market in a bigger way.”