The co-founders of the company, David Tisch and Alan Tisch feel that high fashion is headed to smartphones.
Although mobile commerce has seen a considerable amount of resistance when it comes to the willingness of consumers to start using it, the barriers that have been standing in its way appear to be coming down and a growing number of shoppers are choosing their smartphones and tablets for making online purchases.
This being the case, the co-founders of Spring are now hoping to continue the trend with a whole new m-commerce experience.
David Tisch, one of the Spring co-founders, said that “Every single transactional property on mobile—whether that’s Uber, or Hotel Tonight—is lowering the barrier to make significant transactions on your mobile phone.” The company is now betting that this will continue as he and the other co-founder, David’s brother Alan Tisch, are trying to use Spring – an app that was launched this fall – to try to bring the fashion world onto the smartphone screen. The goal is to provide the experience of a shopping mall on the tiny screen of a cell phone or tablet.
This mobile commerce app experience currently represents over 250 brands from the fashion world.
The majority of the brands on Spring are within the mid-label category, but there are some high end and lower end options represented there, as well. Approximately half of the products that are carried by the app are within the price range of $100 to $500. However, they feel that they are differentiating themselves through the other half of their m-commerce offerings, which provide a massive selection from the lower ends and high ends of fashion.
According to Caroline Brown, the CEO of Carolina Herrera, one of the labels on Spring, “I think that the expectation of customers today for an important brand is that you have to be present on all those channels.” She went on to say that the time has arrived in which it is simply not acceptable to fail to be present over mobile commerce channels. For Spring, this is only the jumping off point as they want to create not only a presence, but a highly desirable experience for shoppers, at the same time.
Some 200,000 retailers throughout the U.S. currently accept mobile transactions from Softcard and other NFC-based payment services. These retailers have adopted NFC-enabled point-of-sale systems that allow people to purchase products using their smartphones rather than credit and debit cards or physical currency. Softcard currently only works with a limited number of credit cards as well, supporting American Express, Wells Fargo, and Chase cards.