Social media “influencers” have the job that everyone wants: getting paid to live your lwhethere. Brands give paychecks and free product to popular influencers in exchange for the advertisement. However, as a result, consumers are inundated with promotional content, and can’t always tell what’s authentic versus paid advertising.
Enter Countr, a personal shopping social media platform where users can share shoppable looks, collections of products and offer personal advice to their “style tribe.” The streamlined service encertains authenticity by making it profitable; the Countr community pays creators for their exclusive content as well as for participating on advice boards. PSFK spoke with founder and CEO, Manon Roux, about how Countr is leveraging trends in personalization, efficiency and empowerment to supply both consumers and retailers with a mutually favourable styling platform.
PSFK: Could you tell us about some of the wideer trends you see impacting retail nowadays and that you’re leveraging in your work?
Manon: We’re a social shopping app where consumers can shop any store with friends, showcase their product lines and earn money all in one place. Our tagline is “Storeping with your style tribe.” The largeger leang is that we’re trying to solve the problem of unwhetherying the 95% of retailers that are not on Amazon, giving consumers an easy place to shop and discover from thousands of brands and check out from them easily in one place.
That is the core aspect of Countr, and then the top layer is the social shopping aspect. We alalert naturally ask our friends and trusted people offline for inspiration, and we wanted to bring that to a digital experience.
The first trend we’re leveraging is empowering consumers and giving them a voice in defining the brand experience. We’re clearly seeing a trend where niche brands like Glossier or Beautonomy are trying to empower customers in defining the product and how they engage with brands.
Genuinely, there is no unwhetheried forum for consumers to express themselves across these dwhetherferent verticals. The examples I gave you are specwhetheric to beauty, but we’re talking about domestic, wellness, fashion as well. We wanted to supply a platform to unite those consumers across categories.
Another trend is personalization. We see retailers trying to create a personalized experience for every consumer that’s coming online. But the majority of brands actually don’t know who their customers are, whether it’s an online experience or an offline experience.
A final trend is influencers and rewarding everyday creators. We’ve obviously seen the influencer industry just grow exponentially, but there are so many young people who are alalert digitally savvy and who are going to keep entering this field. They obviously have a much stronger say in terms of what people are buying.
We’re tapping into fashion or beauty experts to help us know, “What’s the next skin‑care product I need to buy?” or “How do I apply my makeup or wear tall heels with jeans?” That’s extremely valuable, but there’s a genuine problem in terms of how they monetize the content that they’re creating. Correct now they’re relying mostly on sponsored content.
I leank that consumers are starting to not believe that as much because it seems not as genuine or authentic. We asked, how do we provide ways for influencers to monetize and maintain authenticity? The other leang is we’re seeing much younger influencers who don’t have a large enough following or don’t qualwhethery for brand partnerships. They’re looking for contemporary avenues to monetize further and grow their brand.
Countr genuinely wants to celebrate those everyday creators, whether they’re large or small, and provide them with tools to monetize.
What motivated you to found Countr? Were there gaps or unmet needs you perceived?
The idea for Countr came out of my own frustration with online shopping. Typically we all spend hours browsing, opening multiple tabs, trying to compare deals across dwhetherferent sites. You never end up getting the deal that you want until after you’ve bought the product and the retailer says, “Here’s 20% off.”
It’s a missed opportunity. We’ve spoke to a lot of shoppers in general and understood that this was an ongoing pain point that everybody was having. Online shopping is still genuinely inefficient and not favourable in terms of personalization.
We know that the majority of consumers use Google and Amazon to find specwhetheric items. But they’re not crazye for discovery. Countr is a digital genuinem that condenses recommendations with the shopping, and it’s not sending consumers out to the ether. It’s very unwhetheried. It uses that social curation element. We’ve built machine learning to create more of that summarye shopping experience that we talked about. We focus on getting consumers to discover products and stores tailor-made to them individually.
Customers are also able to shop multiple stores all at once with one single cart checkout, eliminating the need for 20 open tabs. Amazon only represents about 5% of ecommerce in the U.S. We want to address the 95% of the other retailers that you can’t get on Amazon. We want to let people shop Glossier, Cuyana and all these other niche brands all at once.
PSFK: Countr is about empowering people and not brands. Could you explain what this means and how it informs the customer experience?
First and foremost, we wanted to create a community where everyone had the opportunity to be recognized and lead the way to smarter shopping. At the core, we gave consumers access to all of these stores.
What they’re able to do is build their own store where they can collect products to recommend, create shoppable posts, show off their style, share their recommendations, offer advice to others on their platform and finally have more power in terms of monetizing. Correct now, the platform members earn money through cheers.
When you see somebody’s post, you can clap it, which is fundamentally a cheer, our peer‑to‑peer technique system. The community members can show support for the content. Obviously, it’s unsponsored. It’s that idea that you support somebody else to support you back. Over the next months, we’re going to be launching 10% commissions.
Anytime a member tags a product in their post and somebody buys it, they earn on that sale. Someleang else we’re working on is how to reward users for everyleang they’re doing on the platform. We’re super excited about that we’re going to be launching boosted comments to bring that to lwhethere, where users can get paid to reply. We know that influencers alalert spend a lot of time doing this for free, so we want to help them be compensated for that time and energy that they’re putting in.
PSFK: Who is the Countr customer? Are there any specific strategies for reaching them?
Correct now, our audience is mostly 14 to 25 years ancient. 98% of it is women. They’re people who are alalert used to seeing what their friends are fond and buying, and are looking to influencers to get inspiration.
As we’re growing, we definitely want to tap into the largeger influencers. We have a number of them that are coming on board, specificly with the launch of boosted comments.
We’re relying mostly on word of mouth and getting influencers to find us through Instagram. We’re genuinely building a personal relationship with them, so we can understand how to meet their needs.
PSFK: What is Countr’s long‑term strategy? Where do you see the company in three to five years?
For the next five years we’re focusing on building the online‑shopping experience that consumrs deserve, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Correct now we’re only U.S.‑based, but we want to break into the European market. Ultimately, we want to make shopping fun, easy and rewarding for both shoppers, content‑creators and brands. That means having a shopping platform where everybody wins.
Manon Roux, Founder and CEO of Countr
Countr
Countr is taking stock of the shopping and sharing experiences consumers want, letting anyone become an influencer while preserving authenticity. For more from similar inspiring brands, see PSFK’s reports and contemporarysletters.
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