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Minted tackles stationary market
Co-founder of Eve.com, and former executive at The Body Shop Mariam Naficy is an experienced entrepreneur in the e-selling business. This week her newest project Minted.com lanched, an online do-and-pick it-yourself stationery shop. With Minted Naficy hopes to conquer the US stationery market worth $10 billion.
The company appeals to professional designers to create high-end graphics for its site, which it can then resell to shoppers looking for wedding invitations, birthday cards or birth announcements.
Naficy has a strong track-record in e-selling. In 1998 she co-founded the online cosmetics shop Eve.com, which was sold to Idealab for $110 million in 1999, only to shut down five months later and sell its assets to LVMH in 2000. In 2003 Naficy joined The Body Shop International where she made its e-commerce business profitable within the year. In 2007 she left to develop Minted.com.
Selling stationery online is interesting to Naficy, as she told thedeal.com, “its typical transaction size is in the hundreds of dollars, compared with, say $50 for a typical sale on TheBodyShop.com.”
The business model, based on ‘crowd-sourcing’ has generated a lot of interest from male investors. Last year Minted raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors such as eToys co-founder Toby Lenk, currently president of Gap, Frank Han, former CEO of Glimpse.com, Ben Elowitz, founder and CEO of WetPaint and co-founder of Blue Nile; and Nirav Tolia, co-founder and former CEO of Epinions and Alex Slusky, founder and managing director of Vector Capital.
Investing entrpreneurs Adrian Bellamy, chairman of The Body Shop and Josh Hannah, co-founder and director of Flutter.com and former CEO of eHow.com, have joined the board of directors.
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