Meet Philly’s brand-new mobile shopping app, Cataluv

Allison Berliner took the beginning of 2015 to step back and reassess.
Should she keep working on her startup Spot It Buy It? Should she start a new company? Should she give up the founder thing all together and join someone else’s team?
The whole process, the soul searching — it felt good. It was liberating to know she had options.
It hadn’t felt like that just a few months earlier, as she scrambled to put together a product for DreamIt Ventures demo day after realizing that her first startup, a matchmaking service for indie brands and brick and mortar stores, wasn’t solving a real problem. That’s how Spot It Buy It, a way for brands to monetize Instagram, came to life. Now, it was time to figure out if this was the right track to stay on.

She came to this conclusion: She still wanted to build and run her own company, but she wanted to do something different. Spot It Buy It felt more like a “rebound business,” something she put together to take advantage of demo day but didn’t actually feel that close to her heart. So she set to work on a new mobile app, a shoppable mashup of Pinterest and Instagram, focused exclusively on home decor. The free app is called Cataluv. It launches today.
Download for iOS
On Cataluv, home decor brands post photos to a sleek, Instagram-like feed. Users can save their favorites, a la Pinterest, and buy items directly in the app.
Berliner calls it the “ideal version” of a mobile shopping app.
The company takes a 10 percent commission off every sale.
It’s a shift from Berliner’s first two businesses in that it’s a consumer app. Her last two companies marketed directly to indie retailers.
The team has changed a little since its DreamIt days — former CTO Roopak Majmudar is now in New York City at Venmo and developer Yingkui Lin is now heading Cataluv’s product team. DreamIt still has equity in the company, Berliner said.

They’re also still running Spot It Buy It, which is generating revenue and helping fund Cataluv right now.
As for Berliner, who’s on the brink of another big launch — marriage (she wears her engagement ring on a chain around her neck — she’s confident about her decision to pursue another startup.
“I wanted to prove that I could get back up and do it again,” she said. “And do it better.”