Officially launched in 2012 just before the SXSW festival, Mulu.me is one of the most exciting curation-based community platforms. Joining the ranks of Pinterest, The Fancy, OpenSky, Lyst and Svpply, Mulu allows users to save and share items they love, with one major point of distinction: a direct purchase path that allows users to make money for themselves, for their businesses or for the charities of their choice.
So far, brands like Michael Kors and Elie Tahari, and celebrities including Jeremy Piven and Kerry Washington, have taken notice and set up an official presence. In its very first month, the platform distributed $25,000 to causes.
Today, we talk with the founder of Mulu, Amaryllis Fox, to bring you an inside look at the platform and what it means for the industry.
Amaryllis Fox, as featured on Paper Mag
So far, brands like Michael Kors and Elie Tahari and celebrities including Jeremy Piven and Kerry Washington, have taken notice and set up an official presence. In its very first month, the platform distributed $25,000 to causes.
Today, we talk with the founder of Mulu, Amaryllis Fox, to bring you an inside look at the platform and what it means for the industry.
Q: Okay, let’s get this one out of the way. How is Mulu different from Pinterest?
A: Pinterest and Mulu are both image-based and so often get compared, but that’s really where the similarity ends. Pinterest is an online pin board, a way to save and categorize images online. Mulu is more of a social commerce platform where friends, experts, magazines, and celebrities recommend the things they love and every purchase supports a curator or their favorite cause.
Q: Many ideas start with a moment of inspiration and then snowball. What was your moment of inspiration and how did it evolve?
A: It was sort of two-fold. In its earliest incarnation, I was eighteen and deciding between two very different paths in life – aerospace engineering at the naval academy and law at Oxford. I figured some geographic perspective was in order and wound up working along the Thai-Burmese border. It was the first time that I’d done hat-in-hand fundraising for sixteen health clinics along the border and it struck me as pretty unsustainable. There had to be a way to support those kinds of social programs as a byproduct of an otherwise interesting, useful, commercial project.
Oxford seemed marginally better suited for that type of the thing than USNA, so off I went. A few years later, the idea for Mulu gelled during a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. We’d been talking about how Oprah’s recommendations had generated $10m for third-party businesses over 25 seasons. I’d done some work with affiliate programs – the 5-10% that retailers send bloggers as a thank you for referred purchases. The question that struck me at that concert was, “What would happen if recommendations like Oprah’s, and those from our own friends and family, were all made on a platform that pulled out that affiliate payment for a social cause?” Sending a percentage of every transaction we all conduct online to fund something important was a pretty exciting prospect.
Q: How should individuals and brands see (and seize) the opportunity on Mulu?
A: By recommending the things they love on Mulu, both people and companies have the opportunity to share their favorite finds, build their lifestyle brands, and earn money for a cause they believe in.
For retailers, it’s about engaging their communities to make an impact by sharing their favorite products from a given line – that’s a really exciting positive circle – raising awareness for the brand, translating into sales, and supporting an amazing cause. It’s an actual win-win-win.
Q: Tell us more about the purchase path and the affiliate model; how does this work?
A: When a visitor clicks one of your recommendations, on your page or in an answer you’ve created, a portion of any resulting sales (called an affiliate fee) is given back to Mulu. That amount generally falls in the 3 to 15 percent range of the sale price. It can go as high as 20 percent in industries with high margins, such as jewelry or flowers. You, or your cause, get 50 percent of that commission. As your community comments on, shares, or buys your picks, you earn guru points that promote you to earning 75% and, ultimately, 90% of that for yourself or your cause.
Q: The site has this nice mix of images and text questions. Where did the idea to allow users to pose questions come in? How do you think this serves the community?
A: Q and A is such an integral part of our product discovery and assessment process offline; it seemed only natural to offer a kind of Quora for products. Think about the number of times you chat with your friends about what they’re reading, the film they saw last weekend, where they recommend you eat in NYC, or what you should buy your new squeeze for his or her birthday. Being able to open those questions up to a community of friends and experts is pretty powerful. Imagine Lance Armstrong recommending your next bike or Pete Wentz answering your question about a beginner guitar.
Q: How is the celebrity angle working so far and is it different than the OpenSky model? Do you see this being a big driver of traffic, participation and purchase?
A: OpenSky and lots of other great sites out there use celebrities to endorse the products that they sell. Mulu is a very different kind of project. We have a completely open, democratic platform where any regular user, expert, brand, or celebrity alike can create rich multimedia pages filled with their favorite items (products, places, books, music), “curate” their picks to share with the world, and earn money for themselves or the cause that they choose. That’s a powerful idea, enabling anyone from any walk of life to earn cash for themselves or their favorite charity using only their influence, big or small, and their awesome taste in shoes, books, camping gear, or just about anything else.
Q: What are guru points and how can we get some?
A: Guru points are Mulu’s way of highlighting users who are really nailing it in a particular area. You earn them any time an item you recommend gets loved, commented on, shared, or bought. As you collect them, you work toward becoming a leader in a specific area; for example, a tech guru or a fashion guru. Once that happens, your answers in those categories are highlighted as authoritative and a higher percentage of your sales go to you or your cause. We’ll be building out this gamification element over the next few months.
Q: What do you see for the future of the Muliverse?
A: We’re really excited about a number of fantastic collaborations on the horizon, as well as a new look and feel to the site, designed to help surface all the amazing content our users create every day. We’ve just wrapped up a competition with Universal Pictures, challenging fans to curate their Snow White and the Huntsman picks in support of 826LA, an amazing program supporting at-risk kids through storytelling and creative writing. Before that, we collaborated with LIVESTRONG to get Lance’s fans curating collections inspired by the idea “Yellow” – anything from Yellow Submarine by the Beatles to lemon sorbet, with all proceeds supporting LIVESTRONG’s amazing programs. We have more of those kinds of partnerships lined up for summer, as well as a few surprises in store.
In terms of the future, our role is to connect users with everything that they hear about in conversation with friends, read about in a magazine, watch on TV, or see tucked under a celebrity’s arm. Love your friend’s iPhone case? Buy it from his Mulu page. Want the album you just saw reviewed? Buy it from the reviewer’s page. Kind of digging the coffee table in a film you just watched? Buy it from the film’s page. And do it all for a cause. I mean, really—who says you can’t find the things you want while doing a little good?
