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November - 2009 - issue > Spotlight: Internet
Kaboodle Makes Online Shopping Simple and Fun
si Team
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Way back in 2004, Manish Chandra and his wife, Asha, got frustrated during the remodeling of their home. They found the process of sharing and discovering new products and retailers that matched their personal taste and style difficult. As it stood, the online shopping platforms were great for price comparisons. But when it came to shopping for key categories, such as fashion, home, and beauty, most sites just compiled product catalogs, leaving people to fend for themselves in a sea of information. Finding and keeping track of one’s favorite products online and deciding what to buy was a painful and inefficient experience. So, in 2005, Manish and co-founders Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya, who shared his vision of a new approach to online shopping, got together to transform the process into a more social and much simpler experience.

Today Kaboodle (www. kaboodle.com) is a vibrant social shopping community where people discover, recommend, and share products. Kaboodle’s shopping tools allow users to add products from anywhere online to their Kaboodle lists. As a result, it is home to the world’s most extensive catalog of user-curated products, making it the trusted source for discovering, sharing, and buying products from retailers large and small. With more than 15 million unique monthly visitors and a devoted community perpetually adding more finds, Kaboodle provides the ultimate platform for connecting people with products. In August 2007, Kaboodle was acquired by HearstCorporation (www.hearst.com) , and is part of the Hearst Magazines Digital Media site network.

Speaking about the market opportunity, Manish Chandra says that Kaboodle remains focused on its singular mission to be the key destination for women to find the best user-curated products in key areas such as fashion, beauty, and home. These are the fastest-growing categories in e-commerce and advertising, with online apparel sales alone crossing $20B in revenue.

Kaboodle competes with online shopping companies, women-focused sites and other social shopping companies. The company’s unique advantage is based on two pillars – its patented core information extraction technology and its fast-growing community of passionate shoppers.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, the company was rated by Comscore in 2009 as one of the top 150 domains in the world.
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