Trouva adds Berlin indies to offer, plans more European cities

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 18, 2018

Trouva, the British retail marketplace platform that gives consumers access to merchandise from independent retailers, has added a number of Berlin stores to its existing UK offer. It’s the first fruit of the £7.5 million cash injection it got from from BGF Ventures, Index Ventures and Octopus last autumn.

It has added 20 stores in the German capital as UK consumers become increasingly focused on international brands and the company's consumer base outside of its domestic market grows. 

This new offering includes The Amazing Crocodile Design Store, Type Hype, Chi & Co and Moeon, among others.

The company’s CEO and co-founder, Mandeep Singh, said the addition of Berlin comes at “an incredible time for growth” at the company with the recent investment having enabled the move that is “the first stepping stone in our mission to unite the world’s greatest independent shops on our platform”.

Co-founder and CTO Alex Loizou told The Standard that Berkin was a clear choice for the first international launch as it’s a “creative capital”. The 20 new stores there were hand-picked by the company’s team with Loizou adding that “there is an incredible wealth of new inventory and new styles that are currently locked down in Berlin.”

Alongside the launch, the company has also added a local area discovery tool and other content and it’s also offering click & collect so, for those who can get to the individual stores, Trouva could also act as a footfall-driver. 

The five-year-old company, which has its HQ in Islington in London, was founded to address the fact that e-commerce may have made it easier for local consumers to shop globally, but smaller independent stores are often left behind.

Its marketplace gives those stores chance to get online with Trouva’s tech providing key services such as inventory management, shipping logistics and customer support. That’s crucial as these are often stores that might only have one staff member on duty at any given time, meaning that fulfilling an online order would mean closing the store for a trip to the post office.

Its latest growth spurt has also seen the company adding new staff with 48 people now spread across London, Lisbon and Berlin.

So what comes next? It expects to add more cities to its store line-up soon with Paris, Dublin and Amsterdam all on the hit list. Key Nordic cities such as Stockholm and Copenhagen are also being considered, but as a longer-term goal, the firm wants its business to be more global with cities such as New York and Tokyo part of the network.

Although most of its customers are UK-based at the moment, currently around 15% of the company’s sales come from the US, Australia and European countries.