Shauna Mei (Left): CEO & Founder of AHALife
This afternoon, I was lucky enough to sit down with Shauna Mei, founder of AHALife, backstage at TechCrunch Shanghai to talk about her company.
AHALife acquired Kaptur, a photo sharing app, for almost one year. Mei said it is a great acquisition for both of the two companies. Kaptur created an innovative user acquisition engine which is completely based on social attraction of human beings. Kaptur scaled up rapidly, not only acquiring over a million users, but also gained access to users’ social networks. Based on the data collected by Kaptur, it is very easy to target the customers, and then, AHALife can send very specific messages according to their preferences.
On the other hand, being acquired by an e-commerce company gives Kaptur a quick path to monetize its huge user base. After the acquisition of Kaptur, AHALife announced 1.5 million of combined users.
AHALife is a curated e-commerce platform for designers, which sells designer products by telling stories about who the designer is, where they are from and what they believe in. The company represents over 2,000 brands and has more than 40 tastemakers who have expertise in specific fields, said Mei.
The company recommends wide categories of products by sending emails to customers on daily basis. The selection of recommended products is a combination of science and art, said Mei. For the science part, AHALife picks products with great qualities, which customers cannot find anywhere else. For art the art side, AHALife aims to create a lifestyle with products covering everything from food, beauty to fashion and design, helping people to live a complete life.
AHALife aims to introduce foreign designer products into Chinese market in the future, but they planned to tap and test the market slowly, Mei added.
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