Heather Udo
- Founder and CEO at Shoppable
GetLatka interview
How Shoppable Reached Profitability with 20 Employees and $5M Raised (Interview with CEO Heather Udo)
Heather Udo (Founder and CEO of Shoppable) spoke to Nathan Latka on May 26, 2017.
Shoppable figures from the interview
- Total Funding Raised
- $5M
- Team Size (2017)
- 20
- Products on Platform (2017)
- Just under 30,000,000
- Merchants on Platform (2017)
- 400+
“We created a technology that essentially lets you purchase anything that you see anywhere online. So if you think about ecommerce, in general, you can of course purchase things directly on any retailer's website. But if you think about everything else that exists from social media, to blogs, to publishing content, to ads, videos, everything else you see as consumers were discovering products so many other places.”
“We actually launched the technology with the Wall Street Journal during the holidays, and by having them on board, they actually, you know, as someone with the Wall Street Journal of that caliber of branding and that type of company was able to bring in a bunch of retailers and advertisers that they already work with, and then that kind of helped fulfill the need of the products out of the gate for that particular partnership, and it really created this amazing flywheel type of experience where once they were onboarded in general for them, they were onboarded for the next company and the next company and the next company.”
“We actually are not about bringing people to shoppable.com, it's about bringing the technology to where consumers already are, so integrating the technology across a number of other different websites.”
Bio
While with Shoppable, she won the 2013 Women in Digital Award from L’Oreal and was named one of the ten "Most Powerful Millennials in Manhattan" by Gotham Magazine, and one of the eleven "Tech Gurus Changing the Luxury Game" by Refinery29. Shoppable was a 2014 Webby Award Honoree for "Online Shopping," a 2016 Webby Honoree for "Technical Achievement" and named one of the "100 Brilliant Companies" by Entrepreneur Magazine. Prior to founding Shoppable, Heather was on the founding team at Affinity Labs, a digital media company that became the largest collection of online professional communities. While at Affinity Labs, Heather played a critical role in their sales efforts and led the company display advertising and lead generation sales and business development from the ground up to profitability. In January 2008, Affinity Labs was acquired by Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW). Heather has also spent over six years working in retail for women's clothing retailers such as Ralph Lauren, Express (Limited Inc.), and Abercrombie & Fitch. She launched her first "venture" at age eleven, an arbitrage business on eBay. Heather received her undergraduate degree in Business Administration the University of San Francisco and the London School of Economics. Heather Marie Udo has been a live TV guest on Fox Business' Risk & Reward program and spoken at many technology and retail conferences including Decoded Fashion New York, Decoded Fashion Milan, L2 Business Intelligence, FashInvest New York, and Wharton Business Radio. She has also spoken at private events on innovation for Citibank, Thompson Reuters, WPP, and Harvard College.