A NEW web venture offering shoppers help to find high street fashions that suit them is vying to raise £1 million at a technology investor conference in Edinburgh next month.
Mallzee, run by 25-year-old entrepreneur Cally Russell and based in the capital, is one of 16 young Scottish companies which will pitch to investors at the Engage Invest Exploit (EIE) conference.
"We are a clothes finder, or an online stylist for people," said Russell. "We get users to do a quick quiz and then use algorithms to find clothes that suit their style from our 250 retailers."
The concept, which will be beta-tested by several thousand people next month before going live in June, aims to make money by driving traffic to online retailers and taking a commission on goods sold.
Mallzee has already attracted £150,000 of funding from Scottish Enterprise and a group of Edinburgh-based private investors. It is now targeting £1m of funding with a view to growing aggressively, including breaking into the all-important United States market.
"It's a grow-big-or-go-home company," Russell said. "The money will allow us to get into the US and consolidate our position in the UK market. Our target by the end of three years is to have one million shoppers per year."
Russell, who specialises in sales and marketing, said he unsuccessfully pitched at last year's conference fronting a different venture called Recommended By, which aimed to get people to share their favourite brands through social media.
"Mallzee came from a week of going, 'We haven't got the right proposition yet,' and from realising that the way people shop has changed. There's been a huge increase in online shopping."
EIE, which has grown out of the Edinburgh University School of Informatics, is the biggest of its kind in Scotland and arguably the biggest outside London, according to the organisers. Now in its sixth year, it has expanded to include life sciences and "clean tech" – environmental goods and services – for the first time, while the 150-plus investors and 60 exhibitors are both roughly double the numbers of the previous conference.
Colin Adams, head of Informatics Ventures, a publicly backed agency for driving entrepreneurship in the sector, said: "We had 163 applications for the 60 exhibitor slots. We didn't expect that level of response. All the publicity goes on about Shoreditch Tech City in London. What we are trying to show is that Scotland has an alternative. If we look at companies like Skyscanner [travel] and Fango [fantasy football] and the companies coming to this year's conference, we've some really good products here at the moment."
A panel of experts chose the 16 exhibitors they considered the most promising. Four will make 15-minute pitches to the entire audience; 12 will pitch to investors particularly interested in one of the specialist areas.
l EIE takes place at the Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh on Thursday May 9.
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