ShopRunner, the two-day shipping service founded by the billionaire entrepreneur and sports team owner Michael Rubin, plans to acquire the five-year-old e-commerce startup Spring, multiple sources told Recode. Terms of the deal could not be immediately learned.
Michael Rubin’s ShopRunner plans to acquire the e-commerce startup Spring
Is an Amazon Prime alternative for the fashion industry on the horizon?
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
New York City-based Spring runs an online department store that sells fashion and accessories from more than 1,500 brands — from Levi’s to Gucci. The startup registers about half of its sales through its website and half through its mobile app. It has raised $100 million in financing from investors including Fidelity, LVMH’s investment arm Groupe Arnault, and Box Group, the venture firm started by Spring co-founder David Tisch.
ShopRunner offers its members free two-day shipping when shopping at the online stores of more than 100 partner retailers like Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Bloomingdale’s. Shoprunner members — most of whom get free access through partnerships with American Express and PayPal — spend more than $2 billion a year on partner shopping sites, with ShopRunner taking a cut of each sale.
Rubin and Spring co-founder and CEO Alan Tisch are personal friends. ShopRunner is run by CEO Sam Yagan, an entrepreneur who sold his dating site OKCupid to Match.com and later went on to run the Match Group.
Both companies declined to comment.
For ShopRunner, Spring could give it a large pool of brands to try to lure into its two-day delivery network. If ShopRunner has real aspirations of becoming an alternative to Amazon Prime for the fashion industry, it needs to be available in more places where customers shop — and owning its own marketplace wouldn’t hurt.
Spring, on the other hand, has had success convincing a huge group of brands to turn over their product catalogues to its online storefront. It had a harder time, though, building a giant customer base. Integrating with ShopRunner could attract new customers drawn to a free, two-day shipping option.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
