Today we’d like to introduce you to Olivia Skuza.
Olivia, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My co-founder and I are serial entrepreneurs dating back to our teenage years in Australia. Together, we started two companies prior to NuORDER and sold one of them, a media company in Australia, prior to moving to Los Angeles. In 2010, we were running a digital agency in Los Angeles for premium fashion brands when we came upon the idea for NuORDER. We were witnessing, firsthand, the dramatic shifts in B2C eCommerce, and the resulting experiences and benefits retailers were delivering to their customers.
We saw just how much antiquated and broken processes were hindering sales and hurting the businesses of both brands and retail buyers, and knew we could provide them with a better way. We eventually founded NuORDER in 2011 with the proceeds from our previous venture we sold. Since then, we’ve secured multiple rounds of funding, built our customer base to over 800 brands and created new features to enhance the workflows between brands, wholesale buyers and retailers. Today, NuORDER helps over 800 brands and 300,000 retailers transact, and has earned over $5b in GMV annually.
Has it been a smooth road?
Like most entrepreneurial journeys, ours was not a smooth road from the get-go. One of our earliest and greatest challenges was raising capital for NuORDER. We knew that to grow and make NuORDER successful, we needed to raise capital, but neither one of us had any experience in raising money. Needless to say, we had many unsuccessful meetings with VCs initially. We honestly just didn’t know what we were doing. But we didn’t give up. We kept moving forward, learning from each “no.” We slowly, but continuously, improved each pitch and continued networking with every possible investor.
One day we were working out of a Dunkin Donuts, the closest place with free Wi-Fi. While sitting there, we accidentally ran into David Tisch, the now famous Seed investor from NY. David understood the problem within the wholesale industry we were solving with NuORDER, and immediately began making calls and sending emails to potential investors from inside the restaurant. He also helped us structure our pitch in a way that better resonated with investors. Within one month of that chance encounter, we had closed our initial Series A with Upfront Ventures (Southern California’s largest venture fund).
We’d love to hear more about your business.
NuORDER is a B2B eCommerce platform where brands and retailers can discover, connect, engage and transact with one another in real time. NuORDER provides sales teams and buyers one central place to browse products and catalogs, access up-to-the minute sales and inventory data, and place orders from their computer or our mobile app – 24/7/365. NuORDER is flexible and scalable, with a rich feature suite to support any business – regardless of whether you’re selling designer jeans, consumer electronics or beauty products. We are known for streamlining and modernizing the wholesale buying process in one easy-to-use digital platform – from supporting trade shows to line sheets to bringing the printed catalogs online. In today’s world, streamlined, mobile, discoverable and paperless capabilities are key, and our platform is constantly evolving to meet and exceed the standard user experience.
I am proud that with NuORDER, brands can go almost entirely paperless. Traditionally, the wholesale process is paper-intensive, as brands print and ship millions of pages of product catalogs to retail buyers. The typical NuORDER customer used to print and ship 5,000 copies of four different 250-page color catalogs 3-4 times annually prior to using the platform — that’s 20 million sheets of paper (approximately 2,400 trees). Rather than bulk printing a one-size fits all catalog, NuORDER’s customers personalize digital catalogs and linesheets for each buyer, and email digital copies for online ordering. Not only does this process make the wholesale ordering process much more efficient, it also has a tremendous positive impact on the environment.
The NuORDER platform offers benefits for both sellers (brands) and buyers (wholesale and retail). The two-sided platform allows brands and wholesale/retail buyers to take virtually the entire lifecycle of their business online. On the brand side, NuORDER provides a merchandising and sales platform for the brand to showcase their products, create personalized offers for specific wholesale and retail buyers and drive demand through discoverability. The platform also enables sales reps to take orders, approve and edit buyer-submitted orders. On the wholesale and retail buyer side, NuORDER provides a B2C-like eCommerce experience for discovering brands and products, reviewing offers, and placing orders. Both the brand and retail buyer applications are accessible through the web, mobile web and iOS mobile app.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Los Angeles has been the perfect environment for NuORDER to settle its roots and grow. The city is a long-standing fashion hub, offering access to local fashion shows and premium brands. It’s also a quickly growing tech community that we’re happy to be a part of. We recently relocated to Westwood to facilitate our growth, as it’s is easily accessible from multiple destinations, and we’ve been able to tap into a rich talent pool from UCLA.
Contact Info:
- Address: 900 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024
- Website: nuorder.com
- Phone: (310) 954-1313
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: instagram.com/nuorder
- Facebook: facebook.com/NuORDERwholesale
- Twitter: twitter.com/nuorder
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