Community Highlights: Meet Nicole Phillips-Bastian of Qatch

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Phillips-Bastian.

Nicole, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
After graduating from law school, I went on to work as a lawyer in the fashion and retail space. While there, I learned two important things; first, that e-commerce brands are constantly trying to lower their customer acquisition cost and make their marketing efforts more effective, and second, in order to do that, brands need reliable customer data but most brands have either very little data they can act upon or the data they do have is owned by someone else (3rd party data), limiting how they can use it.

I started thinking about my own shopping journey as a consumer and how impactful and effective personalized marketing was and how I was more inclined to make purchases when a brand accurately targets me with a product I love, and how they can stand to make more money that way. So I came up with the idea for Qatch, which puts customers first and gathers detailed style preferences on them so we can recommend products from over 150+ websites that we think they’ll love, all via text message.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I wish! If you aren’t faced with challenges along the way, you’re either oblivious or you’re building something that no one cares about, neither of which is good! One of the biggest challenges we faced early on was whether to accept capital from an investor that was not honest with us. It was our first $100K and we learned just before a call that they were tangled up in another company that we had legal and ethical concerns around, but the relationship was never disclosed until I had done my own due diligence and confronted them.

It was tough to turn down that money when you were just starting off, but it ended up being the best decision. We are constantly facing fundraising obstacles since less than 3% of VC funding goes to female founders (can you believe that, in 2023?!), and building a product targeted to women adds another layer. Fortunate to have my sister as my co-founder who I can share these challenges and frustrations and whose opinion and judgment I trust as much as my own.

We’ve been impressed with Qatch, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Qatch puts customers first and delivers a personalized shopping experience across all of the brands that we work with.

We gather detailed style preferences, such as sizing, favorite brands, and preferred price points, and recommend products from over 150 websites via SMS. Our algorithm learns based on shoppers’ feedback, so we educate our users to double-tap the product image via SMS to give it a Heart, Thumbs Up, or Thumbs Down to learn what they want to see more or less of.

We’re enabling shoppers to control, use, and benefit from their own personal data in a way they have never been able to before. For brands who want to build a deeper relationship with their customers and deliver targeted marketing that shoppers want, they can leverage Qatch to help them gather detailed customer preferences and deliver AI-generated product recommendations through their SMS channel.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
There is a lot of change in data privacy legislation at the moment, which affects the ability of brands to use 3rd party data for personalized marketing.

But we believe that the future of data privacy is in the consumer’s hands and that they will have complete control over who has access to their data, when, and how it is used. With that, companies need to be prepared to show how they are equipped to protect and use specific data for the consumer’s benefit, and that starts today.

Pricing:

• Free to sign up and get access to product recommendations via Qatch
• To text one-on-one with your stylist, you can become a Qatch VIP member for $4.99/mo. You’ll get unlimited outfit and style requests, additional recommendations, access to exclusive promo codes, and your own Collections page, where all of your favorite recommendations are stored in one place

Contact Info:

• Website: www.joinqatch.com
• Instagram: @joinqatch
• TikTok: @ JoinQatch

Image Credits
Marika Creative https://www.marikacreative.com/