In the era of eCommerce growth, beautiful and playful online shopping experiences help not only to make finding the products faster and easier, but also to differentiate the business from the competitors. Meet Hullabalook – experts in this field!
Company and product name
Where are you headquartered?
Our offices are located in central London (the area of Victoria) – most of our team is based there but we also have people in Portugal and Poland!
What does the company do?
Hullabalook provides SaaS product discovery solutions to retailers. We create beautiful and playful product discovery experiences so shoppers can find the products they want to buy faster and more easily.
Our approach starts with a retailer’s product data – we take existing product feeds then we standardise, enrich and index the results so it can be used within interactive front end experiences. This means the integration effort is kept down, so retailers get up and running within weeks.
What is unique about the company?
Hullabalook is unique because of our approach – providing exciting UX technology and a data platform, delivered as a packaged full stack solution means that it’s easy for any retailer to adopt our technology.
Retailers often struggle with product data from a range of manufacturers in an astonishing array of different formats. Hullabalook provides advanced data analytics tools that will scan the incoming data and by using machine learning algorithms will sift through user behaviour information, understand the user’s intent based on a series of interactions over days or months and compare them to other shoppers ensuring the most suitable results are quickly and clearly available.
What have you learned from early versions of the product or service?
We learned that people really love to shop on mobile, and they love to shop on the move! When we started out we didn’t realise that people would buy a sofa on mobile – but they do, and so now all of our development work is focussed on creating shopping experiences which people can use ‘on the bus’.
We also learned that people hate scrolling! When you have 200 rows on a listings page it takes a long time to get to the bottom, and it’s easy to lose your place. We believe that by reducing scrolling we can make shopping fast and fun – it’s not about de-humanising it with opaque recommendations, but rather about helping people explore what’s out there.
What early traction has the company gotten?
Our first major customer in the UK was made.com and this raised our profile in the furniture and home decor space. Today shoppers use Hullabalook across UK, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Indonesia and soon we will be live in Canada and UAE as well.
We are now trialling our discovery approach into a broader range of categories including fashion, homeware and baby, with many more to come!
Our customers include top brands such as made.com, Mamas and Papas, Houseology, and Kavehome.
Why does your company have high growth potential?
Customers are digitally empowered but time poor and according to MarketingSherpa, over 75% of all shoppers will only spend two minutes on a website before closing it if they can’t find what they want. The brain processes images 60,000 times faster that it does words so implementing visual discovery technology like Hullabalook is a great way to convert browsers to buyers. The president of Pinterest recently said that “the future of discovery will be visual” and Hullabalook believes this will continue to disrupt and dominate retail strategies. Hullabalook is already delivering innovative solutions for e-commerce customer experiences and will continue to develop and grow.
Who is a founder of Hullabook?
The co-founders are Bryony Elliott and Barny Darby who between them have many years of experience delivering cyber security and counter-fraud solutions to some of the world’s biggest companies.
Frustrated that ecommerce technology was didn’t seem to be evolving at the same rate as security technology they decided to start Hullabalook to transform the approach to data and user experience in ecommerce.
Who are the company’s competitors?
There isn’t anybody quite like Hullabalook right now, but there are other companies focussed on making product discovery better. Some of them are using VR, and others are matching products to users’ photographs. We believe the future will be full of exciting new discovery experiences!
How do you plan to scale in the next 12 months?
Hullabalook is continuing its growth with a continuous recruitment programme across engineering and sales teams.
We are expanding our presence into new sectors and countries every month, and we intend to have customers on every continent in the next 12 months.
Maybe it’s time to consider Hullabalook in your e-business? Let us know!
Published November 8, 2017
