The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. Between now and August 4th, the team that raises the most money will receive additional funding to launch their venture.
Leigh Sevin graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in American Studies. She currently works in operations at Zeel in Miami, Florida, helping to grow the company in its new location. Jinesh Shah graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Information, focusing on user experience design. He now works at Rokk3r Labs in Miami Beach as a Senior Product Architect, designing product experiences for a vast array of startups. Together they’re working to build The Redge, a personal shopping cart for the web that allows consumers to store their favorite items and organize them into wishlists.
The Redge is designed to be your personal shopping cart for the web – a safe, centralized storage space where you can round up, compare, and pick items to purchase when you’re ready.
Now, this problem we’re solving probably doesn’t seem too pressing or top of mind. Why build something that people have managed without for so long? That is a great question. Here’s why: Currently 67% of us will end up not purchasing the items we add to our individual carts on e-commerce sites. That’s a crazy number! And if you reflect, I’m sure the reason was not that you didn’t like what you selected — most likely, life just got in the way. But I also bet that there have been times where you felt like you’d missed out on something great. At The Redge, we call this problem “browser’s paralysis,” and we’d like to bring it to an end.
It’s not about buying everything; it’s about taking the time to make smart decisions about what to buy when the right time to purchase comes along.
As co-founders of The Redge, one of our most rewarding experiences is explaining The Redge and having folks eagerly follow up with questions about what features we’ll add next. Right now, The Redge allows you to store an item you like by creating a wishlist and copying and pasting a URL into that wishlist (we’ve linked some of our own collections as inspiration). This is what we consider the Alpha product. There is much more that we’re excited to bring you.
Here’s a list of some of our top priorities: a Chrome extension to instantly “redge an item,” price displays on items and the total price of wishlists, social components such as searching for and following your friends, and of course, one day, alerts on sales of the items you’ve added.
But that’s not all! Oh no way. We’d like to see The Redge go from your personal shopping cart to your personal shopper, equipped with editorial on top products to accompany our collections, experts available to help you find exactly what you’re looking for, and ongoing recommendations tailor-made to fit your taste.
But we’re still at square 1 – albeit with big dreams and a heck ton of ambition. That’s why we’re participating in VFA’s Innovation Fund. We’re eager to keep building, keep improving, and continuing to respond to the needs of our users. To learn more about us and stay updated with our growth, check out our campaign or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.