"Gilt Groupe is going to be one of the fastest-growing Internet companies that has ever happened," predicts Kevin Ryan, CEO of New York incubator AlleyCorp, which owns the e-commerce fashion site.
"We'll do tens of millions of dollars in revenue this year," says Ryan of Gilt Groupe, which is like an online version of the designer sample sales New Yorkers love for their exclusivity almost as much as for their discounted prices.
"I used to walk by 18th Street and see 200 women waiting in line," recalls Ryan, who is the former CEO of DoubleClick Inc. "I asked them, 'What are you waiting for?,' and they said, 'Oh, the Marc Jacobs sample sale.' And I thought, 'That's great, but why can't I do that online, and people from Philadelphia or Westchester or many other places could take advantage of that?' "
"We're taking the burden of schlepping to a sample sale at odd hours of the day, and we're bringing the phenomenon online, not just to New Yorkers but to all of America," explains Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder and chief merchandising officer of Gilt Groupe, which secured $5 million from Matrix Partners last year.
The invitation-only site features limited-time sales of clothing and accessories created by a wide range of designers, from the established Ralph Lauren to Band of Outsiders' hip newcomer Scott Sternberg. The company buys all the merchandise it sells and photographs it all especially for the site.
Gilt Groupe got a new chief executive on Monday. Susan Lyne, the former CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, is replacing co-founder Alexis Maybank in the CEO role. Maybank is taking on the chief strategist title.
Gilt Groupe is one of half a dozen technology startups founded and seeded by Ryan and AlleyCorp chairman Dwight Merriman, who as co-founder of DoubleClick was the online ad firm's chief technologist. For more of Tech Confidential's behind-the-scenes tour of AlleyCorp and its network of startups, see video interviews with Ryan, Silicon Alley Insider LLC CEO Henry Blodget and a previous interview with Music Nation CEO Daniel Klaus. Check back later in the week for our conversation with Merriman. These days, he's chairman of AlleyCorp as well as CEO of its newest endeavor, 10Gen, a so-called "cloud-computing" platform provider backed by Union Square Ventures. - Mary Kathleen Flynn
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