The New Frontier For Shopping 2.0 Is GLIX

Some time ago I attended an engaging conference presenting successful local startups realities in Treviso and I met Sara Spadafora, a bright girl who was able to get ahead in one of Italy’s most famous and lucrative businesses: Fashion. More precisely, she was capable to envision the actualization of a tremendous transformation in this sector, introducing an innovative solution for shopping at a distance: GLIX. As the Internet of Things is becoming increasingly viral, smoothing our adaptation to new ways of living, this new platform can be considered the 2.0 urban shopping solution, allowing anyone to buy unique objects in any city of the world, or even offering the opportunity to people to make some money becoming the personal shopper of other platform users around the world.

How Does GLIX Work?

To better describe how this innovative service works, let’s suppose that Hyun is a young Korean girl living in Busan, who strives for a new fashionable bag, which can only be found in a small boutique in Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris. It would be very hard for Hyun to get what she wants, unless she can finally travel to France, one day… or see Madison, a true fashion victim from Saint Louis, Missouri, who knows everything about pret-a-porter and desires to buy something in the Milan’s flagship store of an Italian famous brand of Via della Spiga. GLIX can finally allow them to get what they want, bringing urban shopping online through the sharing of pictures and a growing network of geolocalized personal shoppers that can easily find the object of Hyun’s or Madison’s desire. As a matter of fact, GLIX targets the so-called globe-shoppers and those people who see shopping a fundamental part in their travel experience, at the same time allowing small local boutiques to go global, putting them in the condition to broaden their potential clients worldwide.

New Fashion’s Street View & Shop Assistant 2.0

The system works as an innovative smartphone app dedicated to fashion lovers, which permits to buy or sell unique products, which otherwise would be extremely hard to find. However, we should take into account that nowadays an increasingly vast number of e-commerce applications deal with fashion, though the majority remains not that much practical. Additionally, the most celebrated boutiques usually have unique pieces that can be hardly found online. These items can become visible through GLIX, as some reliable personal shoppers offer the possibility to look at a specific articles of clothing, which are very far away. But practically, they eventually offer you the chance to buy it. In a few words, GLIX can be considered as the new fashion’s Street View and the new professional figure of the Shop Assistant 2.0, capable to form a connection between shop and web community, which has been created for the first time.

Finding A Bright Intuition Out Of An Ordinary Situation

Like in similar cases of brilliant intuitions, everything started from an unpredicted ordinary situation: Sara just stepped into a shop in Milan and saw a beautiful pair of shoes, of whom she immediately shared a picture with a friend living in Bologna. Her friend really liked those shoes and commissioned Sara to buy them for her. Consequently, other friends in Bologna who received the picture wowed and desired to have those beautiful shoes from Milan, at any cost. In that precise moment, Sara realized that the service she was offering to her friend and friend of friends could have been capitalized in order to become a new profitable and entertaining business opportunity. So how did this innovative service become eventually profitable? Holding the 10% on each transaction, while the personal shopper can boost an item’s price from the 5% up to the 15% for his service.

A Good Start & A Complementary Team

Sara said that the initial obstacles were many, but she was eventually able to self-finance her intuition and thanks to the consequent participation to an acceleration camp provided by the well-known Italian startup incubator H-Farm, the first positive results started to come. In this adventure, Sara was always surrounded by people with relevant complementary expertise in the areas of marketing and programming, CTO and iOS/Android development. Therefore, with Luca Garatti, current CMO and Fabio De Gregorio, who performed the creative development of the app and the management of a team composed by Gianluca Innocente and Kristian Bellò, iOS and Android developers, and Akshay Singh, specialized in Marketing and Communication, Sara launched GLIX, which is now booming at a two-zero pace.

A Winning Intuition For A Service With No Barriers

As a matter of fact, the e-commerce market is experiencing a strong boost, especially in the online fashion segment. It is interesting to notice that more than 50% of transactions take place from online mobile devices. In this context, the best way to combine fashion with technology was a winning intuition allowing for real-time shopping in the world’s leading fashion districts. Shopping in London, Paris or Milan is no longer a dream and all physical and time barriers can be abated. As of today, GLIX has started several collaborations with local boutiques and brands in Italy. Additionally, professional personal shoppers and international fashion lovers are already eager to play their part. It will thus be extremely relevant the answer that the market will accord to GLIX in the short term. The feedback from the final user will help improving the product and to proceed with the promotion, to eventually step into the European market and attain the fixed goals.

Embarking On A Journey With No Final Destination

Sara’s strong determination allowed her to launch her IoT startup. It was not easy to develop such a project, but she decided to embark on a journey without knowing exactly where this would have brought her. The more she got criticized, the better she was becoming prepared to bring her idea forward without any doubt. Her suggestions for those young startuppers, who would like to launch a new initiative is to avoid procrastinating. Startuppers should not be afraid that someone could steal their ideas, indeed they should develop it, talk about it with others and brainstorm, thus laying the foundations for their products.

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