A new Android app and $14.5 million in funding have the folks over at Wanderful Media in a celebratory mood this week. The Los Gatos-based start-up made the technology and funding announcements on April 28.
Wanderful Media, at 100 Los Gatos-Saratoga Road, has 20 employees locally and another 40 in Chico.
It’s already-established Find&Save app for iPhones and iPads is now available for Androids, opening up a whole new customer category. Find&Save features offers from more than 400 retailers that have 150,000-plus brick and mortar stores across the country.
Wanderful has also inked deals with 500 newspapers to post local sales ads online, allowing shoppers to use mobile devices to browse the sales circulars usually found in Sunday newspapers. “We run the online shopping experience for the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post,” Wanderful CEO Ben Smith said.
That helps explain why Wanderful’s major investors are media properties, including the parent company of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. Familiar media names like Hearst, Scripps, McClatchy and Cox Media have also invested in Wanderful, bringing total funding to $50.5 million since the company’s launch in September 2012.
“All of our funding comes from media conglomerates, all of which have newspaper holdings,” Smith said.
Since it’s cumbersome for people to flip through a circular on a mobile phone, the Find&Save app is designed to make it easy to send online coupons and special offers to mobile phones. In fact, Smith believes Wanderful’s phone apps will reinvent the shopping experience.
“For example, Macy’s has a 20 percent off coupon for women’s wear,” Smith said. “Just add the coupon to your list on your phone along with other shopping items, and you’re good to go.”
In addition, Wanderful will utilize location technology to get shopper’s attention. “If you’re near a Walgreens, we’re going to push through deals to your phone because we know where you are and, over time, what you’re interested in,” Smith said. “Likewise, if you’re in Home Depot I can put relevant ads in front of you.”
Smaller businesses will be able to get in on the ad action, too. Wanderful plans to work with shop owners in Los Gatos and Chico to launch that effort. “It’s much more interesting if there’s local content,” Smith said of the Find&Save service.
Women between 35 and 50 years old are Wanderful’s target audience. “They’re the shoppers in the family,” Smith said.
Apparently lots of people have been shopping with Find&Save because Smith brags that “at one point we were the No. 34 app on the whole App Store. In the catalog shopping space we’re regularly in the top 10.”
And just where did the name Wanderful Media come from? Apparently Smith and his team “took a long time” flipping through “a lot of circulars” before landing the available domain name wanderful.com.
