Parenting focused ecommerce site EcoMom, which provides a curated shopping experience for moms, has just received $1.1 million in Series A funding from angels and VCs alike. Investors in the round include Dan Gould (founder of Newroo and Namesake), Cyan and Scott Banister, Dave McClure, Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang, Kima Ventures and David Pell as well as several angels from Angel List.
Like a Zappos for new parents, the six person company sells things to new moms keeping in mind the following strictures, “Are the products safe?” “Are the products useful?”
Ecomom targets LOHAS or the “lifestyles, health and sustainability” market, which CEO Jody Sherman pegs at $200 billion a year. Says Sherman, “If given the opportunity every mom would make the decision to purchase a product that was healthier for their child or safer.”
Likening themselves to the Diapers.com “Green” section, or Amazon Babies, Sherman says there’s no service currently curating parenting products like EcoMom which, with a network of over 13,000 mommy bloggers (growing at about 100 per month) writing product reviews, aims to be the primary resource for parents shopping for their families. “I hope to one day be as big as Zappos,” says Sherman.
But while Zappos is focused on shoes, EcoMom provides a variety of products, currently stocking an inventory of over 2000 childcare-related items in an attempt to apply the traditional ecommerce model to the social/content driven web.
This financing is a big deal for the bootstrapped startup, which went live last February and initially began with shipments of products on pallets to Sherman’s bedroom. While EcoMom is currently not-profitable, Sherman expects to be in the black before the end of next year, “This money will allow us to grow faster,” he says, planning on using the money for site redevelopment, key hires and acquiring new customers.
Update: Sherman informs us that EcoMom has had so much investor interest that the round ended up incorporating another additional 900K and new investors such as Google’s Don Dodge and Chamath Palihapitiya from Facebook. The round ended up closing with over $2 million in funding.