VCs Back Wedding Registry Service Zola With $10M

Zola Inc., a Manhattan-based online wedding gift registry, has raised $10 million in Series B funding as it takes on cutting a bigger share from its competitors, like Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Williams-Sonoma.

The latest funding round was led by Canvas Venture Fund and was supported by previous investors Thrive Capital, BBG Ventures and Female Founders Fund.

The registry service was started by CEO and Cofounder Shan-Lyn Ma and CTO Nobu Nakaguchi — both former employees of shopping site Gilt, which is known to be driven by its flash sales model. However, unlike Gilt, Zola focuses on selling experience-driven products, like wine tastings, cooking classes or help with a down payment on a home, among other household products. Its alternate approach comes from the thought that most couples getting married already live together these days, which means they usually don’t need the average wedding gift, such as a toaster or coffeemaker.

“Our goal is to displace the traditional department store registry and be the registry of choice for millennials,” Ma told New York Business Journal. “The thing that we’ve really seen is millennials are moving away from the big traditional department stores for their registries, because they’re moving online and to mobile when they shop.”

The company reportedly plans on using the funding to grow its registry and expand staff to improve in technology, product development and marketing.

“What we saw was huge growth in the wedding registry business. The tide of millennial couples moving toward the idea of a universal registry just continues to happen in a really big way,” Ma said. “With that growth, we’re really focused as a business on making sure we could support that scale and growth without overly scaling on team or on spend. We’ve been trying to manage that growth in a sustainable way.”

Two years since its launch, Zola has 100,000 couples registered on its platform. The company reportedly earns about 40 percent in commission on the purchase price of products and 20 percent on selling experience-based products. According to New York Business Journal, its revenue has grown from $8 million in the first year to an anticipated $40 million this year, which backs its newfound profitability.

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