Romanian online personal styling startup reaches EUR 1 mln funding after new seed round

Romanian startup The Outfit, an online personal styling service founded by local entrepreneurs Ciprian Dudulea, Șerban Buliga and Horia Stupu, has raised a new seed funding round of EUR 766.000. TSG Capital led this round, which included follow-on investment from previous angel investors (Sergiu Neguț – Fintech OS, Ilinca Păun, Alexandru Ghiță, Andreas Antonopoulos) and a listing on Seedblink, a platform for tech startup investments.

Including this latest round, the start-up has raised a total of EUR 1 million. In the first 12 months since launching, The Outfit achieved revenues of EUR 805,000 and delivered 16,000 orders in Romania, combining data science with the expertise of personal shoppers.

More than 60,000 women created their style profile on the platform, while the product selection is made up of 50+ European Brands such as S.Oliver, Tom Tailor, Edited, Vero Moda, Only and many others.

“This funding round represents a sign of trust in our 30 teammates, that made possible a new shopping experience for people that don’t have time for it. The funds will be used to fuel our growth in the region, hiring key roles (software, buying, marketing) and also improving the product experience with new categories & shopping features for our customers,” said Ciprian Dudulea, co-founder & CEO The Outfit.

The Outfit’s service works as follows:

• Users complete their style profile & their assigned personal shopper suggests an initial selection of items with the help of recommendation algorithms;
• Clients can choose up to 10 items for home try-on. They have 3 days to decide and only pay for what they keep;
• Before check-out they provide structured feedback for every try-on (fit, style, price, material feel) which improves product recommendations for future orders.

“The Outfit’s data capabilities provide personal shoppers access to a «matching index» which is a metric that predicts the probability of a product to be loved by a client. As we collect more data, the algorithms will help stylists recommend better products, optimize the time required to find the right items and make personal shopping highly scalable,” explained Șerban Buliga, co-founder & COO The Outfit.

The rich data sets (from profiles, products, feedback) fuel the algorithms, resulting in high customer retention and increased Average Order Value for recurring clients: 75% increase in Average Order Value after the 5th order and 43% of monthly orders come from recurring clients.

“The data science capabilities give us a significant competitive advantage, and as our data set grows, our algorithms become more reliable. Our mission is to learn about our clients’ preferences and manage their entire wardrobe,” added Horia Stupu, co-founder & Head of Product The Outfit.