The retail industry has been making major innovation leaps in recent years to keep up with the rapid changes in technology. The abundance of ecommerce sites, mobile shopping apps, and NFC and BLE technologies are a testament to that. MVP Innovation is tapping into yet another way that retailers can modernize the shopping experience through the use of cloud-based enterprise software that allows retailers to handle all aspects of visual merchandising through their own web browser.
We caught up with MVP’s Technology Director to find out more:
Year/Date Founded:
July 2014
Number of Employees:
7
Founders/Execs:
David Vandegrift: Technology Director, Background in management consulting at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan Powell: Director of Product Management, Visual merchandising industry expert with experience at Capgemini, JDA, Coca-Cola, and Redbull
Uma Morjaria: Director of Operations, Background in visual merchandising consulting at Capgemini
Funding or bootstrapped:
Bootstrapped/self-funded by founders through minimum viable product. We are currently nearing end of $150K seed investment round
Your Pitch:
MVP provides a cloud-based enterprise software solution for the visual merchandising space in the retail sector. Our software helps retailers and consumer goods producers optimize the layouts of their stores and displays to maximize revenue and profit. The software speeds the creation of hundreds to thousands of “visual merchandising plans” that stores then execute. On the back-end, users of the software can run analytics and scenario analysis to drive revenue/profitability improvement.
What problem are you solving?
The visual merchandising industry has seen a complete lack of innovation in the last 10-15 years. Existing market solutions require lengthy on-premise implementation periods for server setup, software installation, and database integration. Solutions are sold as relatively independent modules that require significant effort to bolt together. MVP has built a solution that requires no on-premise server/software and integrates all of the functionality of the legacy modules, leading to order of magnitude reductions in implementation time and cost for our clients.
Your major (and only) competitor has a huge market share. How will you stand out?
First, unlike our major competitor, we are not really a software company. We have a software solution, but we are first and foremost a visual merchandising company. We will help our clients improve their visual merchandising operations regardless of what the answer is, even if it meant installing the competitor’s solution. That allows us to establish a greater degree of trust and cooperation with our clients, who appreciate that we are just doing our best to help them.
Our biggest competitive advantage is the cloud-based nature of our architecture. We can get a client set up with their solution with the flick of a switch, in comparison to the months-long process they have become accustomed to. We can push out patches and upgrades on a daily basis instead of releasing new versions on a 6-12 month timeframe. Our goal is for our clients to enjoy working with us and using our software in a way that just was not possible when our competitor’s software was developed.
Finally, we can sell our solution for a lot less. The frameworks we are coding with cut our development time to a fraction of what it otherwise would be. As mentioned, our implementation time (from a software standpoint) is virtually instantaneous in comparison with an on-premise solution. And because we are integrating the functionality of all of our competitors’ different modules into a single solution, our clients are essentially getting all of the competitor’s expanded functionality for the price of their most basic module.
Please describe your potential impact in this market/industry:
We intend to disrupt the visual merchandising industry in every sense of the word. We have had fantastic responses from our customer development stage and are already gathering a lot of interest with our initial commercial demo version of the software. The industry is ripe for innovation and retailers are looking for what we are bringing to the table.
One of the side effects of our entrance into the market will be what we call the “Tide Pod” effect. Essentially, because our software can be sold at a lower price point and requires less of the implementation and customization time that came with older solutions, we will gradually shrink the overall size of the visual merchandising market. Some may view this as a bad thing, but we’re pretty confident that our clients aren’t among them. Greater efficiency is always a fantastic side effect of innovation and allows all of the players in the industry to focus on bigger and better things.
And that is what we are really excited about. The stagnation is this industry has actually held retailers back from doing some really cool things. There is no large retailer in the world that we know of that can reliably tell you where a given product is in a given store. That necessarily limits (or at least complicates) retailers’ ability to experiment with neat innovations like proximity marketing, indoor GPS, and video-based traffic analytics. Once we have established ourselves over the next year or two we are excited about partnering with cutting edge retailers to make some of these next-horizon innovations a reality.
How does ATL weave into your story?
First off, Atlanta is home. Several of our team members, including two of our co-founders, grew up and went to school here. We had thought hard about moving out the Bay Area when we decided to start MVP and settled against it for a variety of reasons.
Most people don’t realize this, but metro Atlanta is home to the headquarters of around 10 retailers or goods producers in the Fortune 1000, including Home Depot, UPS (UPS Store), Coca-Cola, Genuine Parts (NAPA), Newell Rubbermaid, Carter’s, and Aaron’s. Dozens of others have corporate offices in the city. All of these companies use visual merchandising and are natural partners for the type of innovative work that we are doing.
It goes without saying, but Atlanta is cheap, which makes all of the difference to a bootstrapping start-up. I think I saw an article state that the average house in metro Atlanta was less than 1/5 the price of one in the Bay Area.
Finally, although we really didn’t get tapped into it until after we got started, the Atlanta start-up community has been incredibly supportive. I don’t think we could have done it without the support of all the other entrepreneurs and mentors that we’ve been able to meet here.
You mentioned that you are currently transitioning out of the development stage. When are you expecting to launch?
We are looking to complete our first commercial implementations in the first quarter of 2015. We’re actively engaged in talks with some big-name retailers and CPG producers who are pretty excited about what we have to offer. That is actually one of the big mindset shifts that we are undergoing: now that we have functional software we want to get out into real-world retail environments and begin to refine it with client input.
