In the early days of Zalando, we relied on a shop system, a CRM, an ERP, and an analytics tool with one small caveat — everything had to be built from scratch. The typical stack that we had to interact with to make decisions around marketing metrics looked a bit like this:

Making data-driven decisions was necessary, but they were challenging to achieve. They were hard to set up, hard to maintain, and expensive.

Since then, a lot has changed, especially for new entrepreneurs wanting to sell online. Shopify revolutionized the shop experience, and a variety of CRM tools (Klaviyo, Zendesk, etc) and ERP tools have emerged.

But one thing remains the same: the reliance and importance of data-driven decision making. Data was, and is, still the key to any successful business selling products or services online. But for the majority of ecommerce brands out there, this is how they still have to deal with data to create insights:

In short, it’s a total mess.

Segregated data pools and tools are incomprehensible for many merchants to stitch together, even though ecommerce companies share many similarities in what data they look at, what channels they advertise, and the sources and the partners they work with. These problems amplify as soon as you need to involve all departments within a growing ecommerce company. How do you work together and make data-driven decisions across an organization when everyone is using different apps to solve their specific problem?

Enter Klar.

Launching today with over 80+ brands, Klar aims to become the core operating system for ecommerce brands by providing insights, analysis, and recommendations across all business functions. The fundamental core to it all is, of course, data. Klar plugs into all available data sources, structures them, and provides pre-configured templates that are easy to manipulate and, by default, address 95% of all use cases. Klar also allows for dedicated workstreams and automation to be set-up up in the tool itself.

Finally, as Klar onboards more merchants, it provides significant and actionable benchmarks to identify where companies have the biggest opportunity to improve. The bigger Klar gets, the more meaningful the benchmarks and recommendations will become, which increases the value of the product and therefore fuels acquisition. Klar can expand its product offering towards a variety of customer needs and let different teams create their own workflow, automation, and insights to let merchants focus on what they actually want to do: building brands and products that people love.

We believe that this vertical and dedicated approach will ultimately replace a lot of the horizontal software out there (a summary you can find here). This trend will happen in an industry that has and will continue to see tremendous growth.

Global ecommerce sales grew eightfold over the last decade from $572 million in 2010 to $4.2 trillion in 2020. It is expected to reach $11 trillion by 2025. Today, there are already over 4 million ecommerce shops built on the most prominent shops systems today, with Shopify being, of course, in the lead here. It’s a market that is not only growing, but where data will play an ever-increasing importance in deciding success vs.failure (the days of piggybacking on Facebook’s growth are over).

Besides solving a pressing issue, we got excited because — you guessed it —the team tackling this problem. Max, Frank, and Cillie have worked together for almost ten years. They first built out Jumia in South Africa (their first touchpoint in ecommerce, where they faced similar issues as Christian at Zalando above) with Max as CMO, Frank as CTO, and Cillie as Head of Engineering. They then took on an even bigger challenge in innovating one of the most opaque industries globally: insurance. They raised over €140 million when building Ottonova and established a new digital avenue for insurance in the German market.

A year ago, the three of them decided to join forces again, huddled up in a small office in Munich (where in September of last year, we had our first beer together). Within six months of starting, they had a beta with dozens upon dozens of customers up and running, driven solely by word of mouth in an industry that is well connected and where new tools spread like wildfire. The team is in a fantastic position to crack the problem at hand and build a category-defining company.

We are thankful that Max, Frank, and Cillie decided to partner with us, and we look forward to helping ecommerce merchants finally get a Klar view on their business operations!

As a side note, the best businesses solve problems for their customers. Carlo encountered Klar while searching for a solution to his problem of getting good and fast data insights into his Kombucha brand that he built next to his MBA. So from that standpoint, he experienced product-market fit first-hand 😉