Phoebe Gates’ new ecommerce startup, Phia, is designed to become a new research tool for price-conscious shoppers.
Phia was co-founded by entrepreneurs Sophia Kianni and Gates, who is the daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates. Kianni and Gates announced the launch of Phia as a free iOS app and mobile browser extension that finds the best prices on fashion while shopping. The Phia shopping tool instantly compares new and secondhand prices for the item being searched, according to the company.
What Phia does
At launch, Phia works with more than 40,000 shopping sites, according to the company. For users, it displays whether the price of an item is high, typical or fair. If a retailer overprices an item, Phia then surfaces better-priced, exact matches and similar alternatives. For users who prefer shopping on their computer desktop, Phia also has a free Chrome extension available for download.
“We, like so many consumers, want to shop smarter and make the most of our money,” said Kianni. “Great secondhand options exist, but they’re scattered across hundreds of websites — and no one has time to search them all.”
She believes Phia can solve that problem,
“Our patented model solves that pain point by delivering instant price insights and better options to help customers make smarter, faster decisions with their money,” she stated.
Kianni and Gates met as college roommates at Stanford University.
Reactions to Phia’s launch
Retail experts offer differing opinions as to where Phia will fit in the shopping and supplier ecosystem.
“What’s game-changing here is that the app itself shows both retail and resale (secondhand) items of the exact or similar product,” said Jeanel Alvarado, CEO and retail strategist at consultancy RetailBoss.
Phia has already been able to garner partnerships with leading resale apps. Those range from The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, ThredUp, Poshmark and eBay to major retailers like Louis Vuitton and Nike, Alvarado noted.
“The shopping app showcases an impressive database of over 250 million inventory in secondhand items alone, not taking into account their retail partners, all continuously available to bargain shoppers using the app,” Alvarado said.
Laetitia Korn, vice-president of marketing of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered retail data firm Akeno, said that — for customers — Phia could potentially shorten the shopping process. It would do so by removing the need for research, price-surfing and other queries, potentially creating a significant shift in the retail sector. Korn believes this could be especially true with Gen Z and Millennial consumers. That’s because those shoppers have a majority of the buying power and prioritize the environment and savings.
What Phia means for retailers
From a business and retail perspective, Korn predicted that Phia will have some impact.
“Phia will create a heightened sense of urgency for businesses to ensure their product information and data are accurate and as competitive as possible,” Korn said. She added that customer experience is as much a part of the price.
And that is where Ben Thompson — a professor at Parsons School of Design at The New School, where he teaches business regulations and practices — said that Phia will have to deliver. Phia, he explained, will have to offer something more than just price comparison. That is because plenty of other pricing tools are currently available for customers.
“I would expect that the brand Phia would need to expand into original content and other reasons to use the app than just price comparison,” Thompson said.
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