California Apparel News

Continuing its growth within the consumer-retail industry, the data-platform provider SoundCommerce announced $15 million in Series A financing, aligning with its expansion through hiring, platform capabilities and customer engagement. Led by the SaaS venture firm Emergence Capital, the funding also included participation from existing investors Defy Partners and Voyager Capital. With the announcement of its funding, the Seattle-based company revealed that Joe Floyd, general partner of Emergence Capital, would join the SoundCommerce board of directors.

“Against the backdrop of 2020, competitive pressure is greater than ever for consumer brands—and data capability means competitive advantage,” Floyd said. “SoundCommerce is the easiest way for consumer brands to leverage modern cloud data warehouses configured for their specific industry and needs. I’m excited to partner with Eric and the team as they transform and enable disruptive brands in this dynamic industry.”

Launched in 2018, SoundCommerce utilizes a multi-cloud data graph examining digital marketing campaigns, product assortment and merchandising offers, distributed inventory management, supply-chain and fulfillment operations, wholesale channels, and unit variable revenue and cost accounting, which supports brands and retailers in their quest to effectively reach consumers. The platform yields information through a real-time outlook regarding inventory, order and shipment status, ad-spend allocation, and targeting of promotional offers and discounts.

Citing figures from Digital Commerce 360, SoundCommerce revealed that 2020 online consumer spend with merchants in the United States totaled $861 billion, for a year-over-year increase of 44 percent. The company feels that while consumer e-commerce spending has increased, brand and retailer direct-to-consumer commerce operations have remained stagnant and unprofitable. SoundCommerce aims to solve the issues that contribute to this problem by integrating information and creating dynamic data models that work within a constantly changing system while integrating with more than 90 software platforms including Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Amazon.com, Google Analytics and NetSuite, in addition to common electronic data-interchange formats.

“The goal of every consumer brand is to align marketing, operations and customer experience with the unique lifetime-value potential of each shopper,” said SoundCommerce Chief Executive Officer Eric Best. “With every business decision informed by real-time and predictive awareness of operational states, unit economics and CLV [customer lifetime value], SoundCommerce provides a comprehensive commerce data graph to achieve this goal. We are so excited to start this next chapter of our journey in partnership with Joe Floyd and Emergence.”