What is CRV and Wonderment's shared vision for the future of post-purchase experience and where should brands focus?

CRV does a lot of ecommerce investing, they see a big part of the market, and have a really good perspective on it. 

One is that brands want to own much more of their data than they have in the past. They want to have control over it and use it. Klaviyo has gotten them hooked on the value of their data, and actually being able to use their data in their marketing, so they're always interested in where they can acquire more data about their customers’ experiences and how they’re experiencing their products.

Our perspective is that brands should have control and ownership over that data at each of those key steps. For each phase of the customer journey, from the first time a customer sees your ads, through the website experience, purchase, delivery, and use. There's this gap in the middle where Wonderment wants to give merchants control and give customers insight.

While merchants can control the ads they show the customer and their website and checkout experiences, there's just this black box in the middle, where they lose sight the moment somebody makes a purchase.

The moment somebody buys something, it typically gets completely handed off to a third party. The merchant sends it to their 3PL, their warehouse partner, who then fulfills that order, ships it out, and hands it off to a carrier that the merchant may not even have a direct relationship with. Then that carrier is delivering it to the customer's doorstep.

The brand then regains control over the unboxing and the product use experiences and the value of it all, there’s just this gap in the middle where the brand has no insight, no visibility, and no control over the experience. 

When we saw that, we realized there was an opportunity to turn this black box into something where the brand could have insight into what was going on, and the trends, and the customers who might not be having a great experience, and help them get in front of those issues and craft their own communications around that. 

Instead of the customer getting an email or door tag from UPS saying, "Sorry we've missed you," and having to chase UPS around, brands now have control of that data and can see that. Everyone can relate to that story, and our partners at CRV agreed that this was a great opportunity and the right team to take on the challenge. 

That's something that most brands have not had access to before, and they’ve never been able to create messages or get insights around that. It blew me away when I started this company that there wasn't better tooling and more available there.