The majority of future online sales will happen offsite. Customers will be able to shop with brands wherever they happen to be whether they're on YouTube, a favorite blogger web site, or in Facebook. Alvenda's customers are moving commerce forward to these touch points and are generating remarkable sales results
Alvenda operates a distributed commerce network that creates millions of opportunities for selling on Facebook and through advertising media. Alvenda enables a merchant's customers to shop and sell with them across millions of locations on the Web. With Alvenda, everybody sells!
Alvenda enables customers to shop wherever they happen to be instead of making them visit a merchant's website. The store is brought to the customer instead of the other way around. Alvenda's first customer, 1-800-Flowers.com, launched during the Mother's Day holiday in 2009 and recognized a 10.5x lift in shopping activity by making it easier for people to shop.
Alvenda went down in history on July 8th, 2009 when it launched the very first retail store on Facebook. Alvenda is enabling Facebook's 300+ million users to not only communicate with merchants but to also shop with them. Shopping with brands on Facebook is more fun because it's a social event. Customers can shop with their friends and they aren't required to leave Facebook to buy something. For example, a consumer can add an item to their wish list and share it with their friends on Facebook. Alvenda makes it possible for that consumer's friends to buy the gift directly on their own Facebook home page.
Alvenda also opens stores across their network of publishers in the form of rich media banner advertising. Consumers can expand the banner, shop, and checkout without getting "clicked-off" the publisher site. With Alvenda, every banner becomes a point of sale.
Alvenda's technology helps retailers secure new customers and reach their existing customers more conveniently, helps publishers increase the value of their advertising inventory, and enables consumers to shop more conveniently.
Alvenda launched its first customer in May 2009 and continues to build innovative technologies at the convergence of social networking, ecommerce, and advertising. Since then, Alvenda has been rapidly adding dozens of new customers including some of the top merchants in the U.S. such as 1-800-Flowers.com, Brooks Brothers, Hallmark, and Mark.
Alvenda, a Minneapolis MN company, was founded in 2008 by three executives with domain expertise in retail software, online retail marketing, and interactive advertising industries. Alvenda was named the grand prize winner of the 2009 Minnesota Cup and has been featured in Advertising Age, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, New York Times, WWD, Bloomberg TV, and Techcrunch. Alvenda is funded by Split Rock Venture Partners.
Management Team
Wade Gerten – Chief Executive Officer
Wade is Alvenda’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. Wade was most recently the Vice President of Product Strategy for Oracle Retail. Best Buy, Walmart, Tesco, Nordstrom, Carrefour and over 200 other leading global retailers accelerated their business growth with merchandise optimization solutions developed under Wade Gerten’s leadership during his 10 year tenure at Retek and Oracle Retail. Wade helped grow Retek from 20 employees in 1995 to the largest retail-specific enterprise software company. Retek was acquired by Oracle in 2005 for $630 million.
Brian Howe – Chief Strategy Officer
Brian Howe is Alvenda's co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. Brian was most recently the head of marketing for Target.com where he managed Target’s marketing for its online and direct businesses. During his six-year tenure at Target, Brian increased online revenue by 15x and helped Target.com become a top three online retailer. Previously, Brian helped Fingerhut.com expand to become the fourth largest online retailer in North America. Brian heads up Alvenda's merchant programs ensuring clients maximize incremental revenue and profits.
Jamie Thingelstad – Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer
Jamie plays a dual role at Alvenda as our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Previously, Jamie was the CTO of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, the consumer division of Dow Jones & Company, and CTO of MarketWatch. Jamie was also the founding CTO of BigCharts. BigCharts was a pioneer in delivering real-time financial information via the web.
Lou Abramowski – Director of Product Management
Lou is Alvenda’s co-founder and Director of Product Management. Previously, Lou was a client partner for Ogilvy Interactive-Lacek, a leading advertising agency, where he developed rich Internet applications for large advertisers. Lou works with Alvenda's merchants to create highly interactive branded shopping experiences that result in happy consumers and high conversion rates. With his work, merchants can create social shopping experiences for Facebook that drive loyalty and sales.
Board of Advisors
Alvenda has organized a team of industry visionaries and leaders to help us develop a valuable offering for our customers and a strong growing company.
Duncan Angove – General Manager and Senior Vice President, Retail Global Business Unit, Oracle
Duncan is responsible for managing Oracle Retail's solution groups, strategic planning, product development, sales, service and support. Prior to joining Oracle, Duncan was the chief strategy officer for retail software leader Retek, which Oracle acquired in 2005. From 1992 to 1997, Duncan worked for Accenture's Consumer Products Practice, focusing on retail, distribution and supply chain.
John Ehmann – Worldwide Director - WebSphere Commerce, IBM.
John is responsible for developing and executing the global commerce sales strategies for the WebSphere Brand. John works with multi-national brands to help them in execute their Web strategies and global expansion. John also leads the IBM effort in China to bring multi-national brands to market via their global enterprise Web strategies.
Prior to Joining IBM, John was the senior vice president of services and strategy for Freeborders, managing director in the etail Business Unit of Scient, and an executive with the Limited and Federated Department Stores.
Rebecca Herold, CISM, CISSP, CISA, CIPP, FLMI
Rebecca Herold is an information privacy, security and compliance consultant, author and instructor. Rebecca has over 16 years of compliance, privacy and information security experience, and assists organizations of all sizes with their information privacy, security and regulatory compliance programs. She specializes in risk assessment, gap analysis, policy content development, awareness and training, strategy development and implementation. Rebecca is also an adjunct professor for the Norwich University Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program. She holds CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, and FLMI certifications and has a B.S. in Math and Computer Science and an M.A. in Computer Science and Education.
Tom Kersten - National Industry Director, Microsoft Advertising
Tom currently drives the retail, telco, and technology industries advertising strategy for Microsoft's Advertising Platform and Publishers Group. He is a 10-year Microsoft veteran specializing in the retail industry. During his tenure he has designed strategic campaigns for Best Buy, Kohls, JCPenney, Target, and several other Fortune 500 retailers. Tom began his advertising career at age 5 when he appeared in a Log Cabin Syrup ad campaign!
Dale Nitschke – Former President, Target.com
Dale recently served as President of Target.com of Target Corporation and held a variety of merchandising positions with Target Corporation since 1985, including the senior vice president and general merchandising manager for Marshall Fields.
Steve Papa - Chief Executive Officer, Endeca
Steve founded Endeca in 1999 to use innovative technology to solve a long-standing class of business problems that stem from information overload. He has led Endeca to become one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world, with five consecutive years of more than 100% revenue growth.
Prior to Endeca, he was an early team member of Inktomi, the pioneer in large-scale parallel Web search, and worked at Teradata, the world leader in large -scale structured data warehouses.