How Strolby is expanding the meaning of ‘shop local’

“Essentially, we do want to be a platform to help people shop small and shop local, but do so online,” Strolby President Sarah Naseer told us during a recent phone call. Last Summer, she joined the company Lara Fitch founded in 2013.
Strolby just added Chicago as its sixth city. The company was picked by Time last year as a startup to watch. The five-person team has been operating in team members’ homes around Dumbo and Downtown lately, as the company continues to add merchants to its shopping site and customers who use it to find unique goods.
Local shops can set up pages on the site, which help people looking in one city find the small stores that curate interesting items. As customers look to the site as a portal, they start to find other shops. Launched with shopping districts in Brooklyn, the site has been opening one site and then expanding regionally, extending the idea of local. It connected Brooklyn to New York’s Hudson Valley, Naseer explained. Then, in Texas, it started with artist community Marfa before spreading to Austin.
“Customers are using our site to both shop locally and shop from other stores in other cities,” Naseer said, which was the goal. The advantage of small stores is they have a smaller set of goods. Looking for a special something on Amazon can be overwhelming, because they have everything.
One way in which Strolby adds value for shoppers is by building a shopping narrative around different business districts, Naseer said. Check out Red Hook’s, for example.
The company doesn’t have a dev on its team. It’s a case that illustrates how SaaS products are enabling small startups to launch more easily. For now, Strolby is all powered by Goodsie. Goodsie is new, just like Strolby, so the two teams are working together closely to build what works for their marketplace.
“We’re really happy at this stage in our company to be able to work with a third-party company and be as happy with it as we are,” Naseer said, though she foresees a day when the company will build its own product. Strolby didn’t have to do that to start, which dramatically lowered the barrier to entry.
Another local company that Strolby can foresee stronger ties to, one day, is Parcel, the home-delivery management solution that we covered in November. Everything that makes shopping online easier advances Strolby’s business model.
The company is currently working on raising a seed round, Naseer told us.