Fashion Shopping App Spring Snags $25M

Mobile fashion shopping platform Spring has closed a $25 million investment and — after eight months iOS-only — launched an Android version of its app, Fortune reported on Thursday (April 16).

The Series B funding round was led by founder David Tisch’s BoxGroup, with participation from Yuri Millner, Groupe Arnault/LVMH, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Google Ventures and Thrive Capital. That brings the startup’s total rise to $32.5 million, with a valuation of around $90 million. The new money is earmarked for international expansion, the company said.

Spring, which went live in August 2014 as an Instagram-like mobile shopping mall for iPhones, had two distinguishing features at the time: Customers could buy with a single swipe, and fashion brands were allowed to control the look and feel of their own sections of the app.

At that point the startup’s founders, brothers David and Alan Tisch, had signed up 100-plus brands, including Nicole Miller, Michael Kors and Levi’s, with a goal of more than 400 brands by the end of 2014. The brand count is now past 700, with additions that include Helmut Lang, Marchesa, Alice and Olivia, Citizens of Humanity, and Rebecca Minkoff. In many cases, Spring was the brand’s first experience with direct-to-consumer eCommerce.

And, as planned last fall, Spring has finally come to Android phones with a native app. The company also still plans to launch a desktop website and will soon offer same-day shipping instead of leaving that up to the brands, David Tisch told Fortune.

That’s not all that’s happened in the past year. “What we’ve learned is that brands are not technology companies,” Alan Tisch told VentureBeat. That meant the brothers had to work directly with the brands to make the checkout seamless.

And on the customer side? “Shopping is a very weird behavior, and I think that we’ve learned that people shop in different ways,” Tisch said. “You want to provide something rich and engaging for that person who comes from five to 10 minutes a day, but also still provide something relevant for that person who shops once a month.”