In 2012, Jalem Getz saw an opportunity in the market for a new type of service. He saw big online retailers like Amazon providing an unlimited amount of products, and boutiques providing customers with world-class service. He then set out to create a service that was the best of both worlds. From that idea came Wantable.
What is Wantable?
Wantable is an in-house personal styling service for women. Our personal shoppers find products we believe our customers will enjoy, and we do this by asking them a series of questions and interacting with them on social media. We then send the customer the products, and she has the opportunity to enjoy them in her home. She then decides if she wants those products. She can return the ones she does not want in a prepaid envelope, and we bill her for what she’s kept.
How did the idea for Wantable come about?
Before this, I ran a large e-commerce specialty company. We would take one category, like children’s birthday supplies, or Halloween costumes, and we would sell everything under the sun. So we thought that the next opportunity would be to come back and narrow down those options for customers. In the last decade or so with the use of social media and with people interacting differently, we had to build a different shopping experience around that.
What sets you apart from similar services?
Our goal is to create the same value that you would have with a company like Amazon, but with the experience that you would have at a boutique. That’s what sets us apart from everyone else. But I don’t think that this has to be a winner-take-all model. Also, we are multiple specialty stores within one brand. A customer comes to Wantable and has five categories to choose from.
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How would you describe a Wantable customer?
The great thing about Wantable is that we can have a diverse set of customers because of the breadth of products that we offer. We can have a 23-year-old college grad that doesn’t have a big budget shop with us. We can also have her older sister who’s well into her career and has more disposable income and a different wardrobe requirement.
But we do have a target customer. That would be a 35-year-old professional female. This is because the value really resonates there. They have a little bit more disposable income, so she’s looking for quality over price. She’s also short on time because she’s been working so hard. She needs quality and convenience and that’s what we provide.
What prompted the move from the Third Ward to Walker’s Point?
It was an expansion. When we started the company in 2012 we had an office on Water Street. A year later we moved to a space on Milwaukee Street, still in the Third Ward. We kept expanding and needing more space, so in the middle of last year we moved again to our current office in Walker’s Point. The biggest advantage over the Third Ward is probably parking.
What are your goals for 2016?
We’re still looking to significantly grow the business. We’re still relatively small. We have just fewer than 50 employees. It’s a good-sized business, and much bigger than the two or three people that we started with three-and-a-half years ago, but we’re looking to build an enterprise organization. That doesn’t happen overnight, and it probably won’t happen in 2016, but three, five, 10 years down the road we want to be a billion-dollar company. That’s what we’re striving toward. The road to getting there is just to continue to do what we’ve been doing.
