People’s Champion finalist 2018: LoveTheSales

Start-up name: LovetheSales
Founders: Stuart McClure, Mark Solomon, and David Bishop
Started in: July 2017
Based in: London
Business description: Sales aggregation website

Shortlisted category:

Consumer Business of the Year

The LovetheSales story:

Retailers only sell a third of what they manufacture, with between 30% and 50% of stock discounted every day.

This leaves them with limited options: either the stock goes to landfill, its incinerated it’s sold to deep discounters or it ties up valuable warehouse space.

Until LovetheSales came along.

Founded by Stuart McClure, Mark Solomon, and David Bishop, the website aggregates sales from more than 850 retailers, making it easy for consumers to browse and buy products at the best available price.

In 2017, Startups 100-listed LovetheSales had 2,400,000 individual consumers on the site – 1,850,000 of those through organic search. 2018 has seen that figure nearly quadruple.

The website uses its own specially created, trusty artificial intelligence (AI) merchandising tool Minerva. Minerva tackles the complexity of aggregating retail products by “outputting normalised attributes for all four million products running through the site”.

What that means in layman’s terms is that users are only shown relevant items as they browse the site and perform searches. It can also now take retail metrics into account and can also understand things such as products of interest, products that are ignored, and retailers who convert well.

Further AI developments are on the cards as well as a universal checkout.

And on the back of a year that has seen overseas traffic and revenue grow 12-fold, the business is looking at moving into the US market within the next year, where a massive £254bn is spent annually on discounted wares.

Why LovetheSales made our shortlist:

LovetheSales is radically changing the way that retailers handle, discount and sell their stock –helping consumers get the best deal on clothes that would otherwise be clogging up warehouse space or clogging up the earth in landfill.

Working with hundreds of brands, from Barbour and Dyson to Apple and Disney, LoveTheSales has become the biggest online sale and clearance outlet in the world. Not bad going for a business idea built out of its co-founders desire to save a few quid!

Where to find out more about LovetheSales:

Website: www.LovetheSales.com
Twitter: @LovetheSales