blog post

Gander Raises $4.2M to Humanize eCommerce

Kimiloluwa
December 14, 2023

Our Story

We launched Gander in December 2021 to solve our personal experience as brand strategists.

Having scaled 23 consumer brands across categories (ie personal care, food, apparel, etc), we recognized the sharp disconnect between shopping in person vs shopping online.

Conversion rates at brick and mortar locations like Walmart, Target, and Sephora sit quite high (~33%) because they’re really good at bringing products to life. Because of strategic product placements, store design, and well trained sales associates brands can put their best foot forward in stores.

However, online it’s quite difficult to offer the same experience and it shows — a “good” eCommerce conversion rate is closer to 2-3%.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve tested, interviewed, and iterated to plan a strategy to address this issue and help merchants grow their businesses.

Why Gander?

Gander is the all-in-one video content platform for ecommerce merchants that focuses on bringing physical goods to life online. Right now, we do that by collecting & embedding video content, but our vision is leverage all of our data and content to create uniquely human eCommerce experiences. Companies of every size — from household names to emerging brands — use our software to increase customer engagement and conversion rates.

Everything we do at Gander revolves around our mission to humanize eCommerce.

Our core product helps brands collect and embed high-converting UGC with ease.

We enable brands to ship their products to our network of creators in exchange for video content and have built a seamless way to place this content directly on sites.

By doing so, Gander gives brands access to the strongest form of social proof and product reviews that meaningfully increases conversion. One of our customers is **Harper Sage,** and their co-founder Leah Grossart said “since installing Gander on our site, we’ve seen our add to cart rate increase by 35%.”

About Our Investors

Crossbeam Venture Partners (Crossbeam) is a venture capital firm that invests in Pre-Seed and Series A startups building tomorrow's economy. Focused on the themes of platform economies, fintech, novel asset classes, and new forms of media, Crossbeam is built to back companies of the next generation economy and the small businesses of tomorrow.

Harlem Capital was founded in 2015 with a mission to fundamentally and forever change the face of entrepreneurship. The firm aims to invest in 1,000 diverse founders over the next 20 years. Established as an angel syndicate, Harlem Capital closed its $40 million inaugural fund in November 2019 and now manages $174 million in assets under management.

At Gander, we’re committed to building the best-in-class video content platform for eCommerce businesses around the world.

If you’re curious and want to learn more about what that looks like, we’ve written the Ultimate Guide To Embedding Videos On Your Website Without Slowing It Down.

And if our mission resonates with you and you’re interested in having a conversation with us, please let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

Kimiloluwa
December 14, 2023