Home furnishing platform The Landing, buoyed by a new $2.5 million seed round, unveiled its new identity Thursday as a social commerce platform that enables users to design together.
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Ellie Buckingham and Miri Buckland co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 to offer a one-stop shop to furnish and set up a home. Today, the company is going online as a product discovery platform that is social, experiential and creator-led via fully shoppable moodboards. A third co-founder, Greg Egan, joined the company in late 2020.
In the early days of the company, Buckingham and Buckland were designing apartments on Google slides and even driving around San Francisco in a U-Haul filled with furniture, Buckland told Crunchbase News.
“We discovered there was a bigger problem than just furnishing,” Buckland said. “There was no way for people to create visually rich designs that they could shop from. We started building The Landing as a shopping destination, for people to discover, design, curate and share with the community in a moodboard format.”
Cowboy Ventures 1 led the seed round, and a group of angel investors including Dara Treseder, Mariam Naficy and Ethan Eismann, also back the company. As part of the investment, Cowboy Ventures’ founder Aileen Lee is joining The Landing’s board of directors.
This is The Landing’s first institutional funding, but the company also raised additional angel investments to bring its total funding to approximately $3 million, Buckland said.
The Landing is deploying the new funding for product development and to build out its community. The relaunched creative tool is flexible, and has a cleaner user interface and a community library for users to add any product from the internet onto the platform, Buckingham said.
“Over the next six months, we will be working on the social functionality to enable users to create profiles, create a discovery feed for their profile and interact in a contextually rich way,” she added.
In addition, the company will pause its shoppable option for the next six to 12 months while it continues to build the community from the ground up and focuses on designing the tooling and engagement aspects of the new platform. Buckland declined to discuss growth metrics at this time, but said the new platform is a very different product that will eventually have the shoppability aspect back in the future.
Next up, the company will focus on hiring across the board for product development and community. It is also exploring micro-payments to in-platform shopability in the future to eventually help creators monetize their talents and passions.
“Once we are launched, we will be building in the social features,” Buckland said. “We are anxious to start learning from our community, interacting with them on Slack and testing monetization.”
Feature photo of company co-founders, Ellie Buckingham and Miri Buckland, and inset moodboard photo courtesy of The Landing.
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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