Sent Items #159: Monday, June 24, 2024

Happy Monday! Hope you had a nice weekend.

Apologies for the lapse in writing last week. It was one heckuva week (I will share more soon)!

Tomorrow is Christmas’s half-birthday. Only 6 months away!

I was recently interview by Izzy Rosenzweig, Founder and CEO of Portless. Snippet below, but you can listen to the full episode here (link)

$6,441

Average price per 40-foot container from Shanghai to Los Angeles the week ending June 20, up 91% since the first week of May.

As to why, it’s a multitude of several things:

• Continued Red Sea crises (see Houthis)

• Nervousness around China in general and leading up to November’s election (companies are ramping production in hopes of getting holiday inventory out ASAP)

• Speaking of which, tomorrow is Christmas’s half birthday - peak always leads to a ramp up of container demand

• Rates have been historically low (though have been creeping up over the last 2 months - see below)

TikTok's First $1 Million Shopping Livestream (link)

• If you are a brand, or a service provider (that covers the majority of you!), and are not thinking about TikTok, you are behind the eight ball. Sent Items #156 I wrote how TikTok’s share of transactions at ShipHero had grown 6X in 6 months. It was near 0% in August 2023 and back in May represented 3.4%. 

• TikTok hosted its first $1 million shopping livestream. Canvas Beauty, a beauty brand, set a TikTok U.S. record on June 8th with a 6-hour live stream that achieved $1 million in sales.

• TikTok has set an ambitious goal of reaching $12 to $13 billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in the U.S. in the second half of 2024.

• TikTok is not a sales channel; it’s an entertainment platform that competes with YouTube and Netflix for attention and sometimes acts as a discovery engine for commerce. Keep your eye on them.

Cold Storage Firm Lineage Is Said to Seek $3 Billion-Plus in IPO (link)

• Speculation is the company could list as soon as next month

• Temperature-contolled storage firm’s IPO may be 2024’s biggest overall - not just in supply chain.

• Lineage Logistics is the largest temperature-controlled industrial REIT in the world. With a portfolio of more than 400 operational facilities boasting more than 2.5 billion cubic feet of space throughout Europe, Asia and North American.

• If you look at competition in the space, Lineage is the most technologically-advanced, and the most well-funded. To date, the company has raised in excess of $13 billion. And nearly $7 billion of that coming in over the past three years.

• In October 2023, the company acquired the assets of Burris Logistics, consisting of eight facilities across the eastern and western U.S.

Zepto, a 10-minute delivery app, raises $665M at $3.6B valuation (link)

• Here we go again! Another “get your bananas delivered in less than 10 minutes” app raising huge $$ at even huger valuations

• In their defense - and my naivety - Zepto is focused on the Indian market, which I know next to nothing about. It appears this more common, practical and economical in the Indian market than it has been in the U.S. market. Zepto’s CEO said, “In India, there is a culture of buying hyper-locally. This doesn’t really exist in other parts of the world. Customers in India buy small-ticket items multiple times a week hyper-locally, and quick commerce gives them hyper-local, high-proximity and low-ticket use cases,”.

• Zepto aims to expand its network of dark stores to over 700 by March 2025. The startup said its revenue has risen 140% from a year earlier, and its annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) is on track to exceed $1 billion. It works with more than 50,000 delivery partners and is adding over 5,000 delivery partners each month.

• Maybe they win and succeed in India. I caution them (and anyone else) to launch here in the United States.

Daydream Secures $50 Million In Seed Funding to Launch New AI-Powered Search and Discovery Shopping Platform (link)

• Well here’s an interesting one. $50 Million seed round for a AI-powered search and discovery shopping platform. I am intrigued! Daydream, a new e-commerce search engine that uses AI to make search more personalized and useful.

• Daydream focuses on providing personalized shopping results by using generative AI, machine learning and computer vision. The company plans to offer up the platform in beta to consumers in the U.S. this fall, and will concentrate on the fashion vertical for the time being. It has already onboarded more than 2,000 brands.

• Daydream essentially lets one search for products using natural language and image recognition — think queries like “I’m going to a wedding in Costa Rica in the summer, and I need some suggestions of what to wear.” You can even upload an image of a piece of clothing and provide an additional filter with conversational language, such as “I want this in blue.”

• Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green believes that Google and Amazon provide uninspired and inefficient search tools for shopping, and that the only personalization offered by many e-commerce companies is in the form of ads.

• Daydream doesn’t plan to fulfill orders and will act simply as a discovery layer for shopping, so it will rely on commission-based revenue at the moment and is not looking to generate any ad-based revenue.

Have a great week!

- Matt

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