First Round Capital

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The hot mall drawing 8 million shopaholics

Wanelo is a fast-growing social shopping startup that found a way to turn image sharing into a profitable retail business.

May 29, 2013 CNN

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Internet Mall Wanelo Gets Personal With Wanelo 3.0

If anything on the Internet is like a mall right now, it’s social shopping site Wanelo. Call it the Pinterest for products or the Twitter for products or the whatever for products, the platform is starting to leave “X for X” territory and become its own thing like Madonna or Beyoncé. Search Twitter for Wanelo and you get stuff like this.

May 7, 2013 TechCrunch

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Meet Deena Varshavskaya, CEO of Social Shopping Sensation Wanelo

Wanelo founder and CEO Deena Varshavskaya seems kind of obsessed with Squishables. They’re spherical stuffed animals that come in varieties like narwhal, owl and panda. She pulls out her purse so she can show off her latest tiny plush find. They’re the new Beanie Babies, she says, and everyone should buy one right now.

April 30, 2013 All_Things_D

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Inside Wanelo, The Hot Social Shopping Service

While a number of startups are trying to build the next broad e-commerce startup, many successes have been vertical sites. Zappos, Diapers.com and more recently, Zulily, One Kings Lane and Fab.com have grown quickly. A new startup, Wanelo, is taking a different approach to e-commerce with its social shopping service. The company has built a very viral social website and mobile app for people to save, share and talk about products. And it has built-in monetization options.

March 27, 2013 Forbes

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Wanelo: Social Commerce Site Is Big With Young Shoppers

The upsides to shopping online are plentiful — skipping long checkout lines and avoiding stuffy dressing rooms, to name two. But the downside is that unless you know exactly what you’re shopping for, it can be challenging to find great new things to put in your cart.

Fashion Tumblrs, Pinterest and Lookbook.nu, a street photography site, are certainly adept at displaying dreamy and sumptuous pictures of items you might want to buy. But more often than not, there is no information about how to purchase an item — or even where it is from.

Enter Wanelo a start-up based in San Francisco that has the same aesthetic as those sites, and one important difference: clicking on an image takes you directly to the place where it’s available for sale — not another blog, image site or Pinterest post. Wanelo (the name is a combination of want, need and love) lets people share items, like articles of clothing, home furnishings, beauty accessories and makeup products, for their friends and followers to see. And they can browse others’ items, comment on them and share them with friends. Brands and companies like Anthropologie, REI and even the Apple repair shop Tekserve can create their own collections of items for online window shoppers.

January 24, 2013 The_New_York_Times

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Investors spend $2M on Wanelo

Shopping for the next e-commerce hit, investors have spent $2 million on budding startup Wanelo, an online shopping community where regular people share their uncommon finds. Wanelo, a blend of the words "want, need, love," is a combination of product-inspiration and social shopping sites such as Pinterest, Fancy, and Polyvore, and is meant to be a store curated by users.

June 7, 2012 Venture_Beat