Who What Wear Closes $8 Million Series B From Amazon, Others

Who What Wear, the shoppable fashion site with 3.8 million uniques, has today announced the close of an $8 million Series B round with participation from Amazon and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. Existing investors, such as Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Advancit Capital, Mesa Ventures, and Double M Partners, also participated in the round.

Who What Wear was started in 2006 by founders Hilary Kerr and Katherine Powers, after the former previous wrote for ELLE Teen Vogue and Nylon and the latter held the West Coast Editor position for ELLE and ELLEgirl.

“We were watching the rise of the gossip blogs online and we realized that we could actually consume the same content we were getting from our magazines online,” said Power.

Who What Wear was born, and is one of three media properties that fall under the Clique Inc. umbrella. Byrdie, a site that focuses on everything beauty, and MyDomaine, which offers up 100 percent shoppable advice, are also under that umbrella. All three sites together see 11.2 million uniques.

Who What Wear, on the other hand, is all about offering up fashion advice. What makes WWW different is that the media site has been doing its own version of native advertising since before 2007, but even beyond advertorial products, the entire site is shoppable.

In other words, every piece of content mentioned on Who What Wear can be clicked on and push the reader into a buyer.

“What makes us different is that our readers have a very different intent when they come to our sites,” said Power. “They might go elsewhere for entertainment or news, but they know that each piece of content on Who What Wear, or Byrdie or MyDomaine, has a call to action. They want to be inspired to try something or buy something.”

The new funding will be used to grow the content business as well as expand internationally, first in Europe and Australia. And beyond that, it seems that Who What Wear is looking to launch its own ecommerce product.

Meanwhile, the investment from Amazon is notable but not unexpected. Amazon has been beefing up its fashion-related products, opening a massive photography studio in London last month and hiring Suki Waterhouse as Amazon Fashion brand ambassador.

WWW’s focus on curated, shoppable content seems like a good fit for Amazon.

You can learn more about Who What Wear here.