Xcel Brands invests in new social commerce marketplace Orme

Media and consumer products company Xcel Brands, which specialises in livestream shopping and social commerce, has co-founded a new short-form video marketplace with KonnectBio, Inc., called Orme, taking a 30 percent stake in the platform.

Robert W. D’Loren, chairman and chief executive officer of Xcel, said in a statement: “Orme is an opportunity with unicorn potential. Orme is redefining how consumers interact with brands and products, creating a seamless and engaging shopping experience that provides a nearly infinite return on ad spend for brands and gives all shoppers an opportunity to participate in the retail commerce flywheel.”

Orme was created to reward customers for interacting with brands and retailers and is looking to revolutionise social commerce by combining the best aspects of affiliate, influencer, and digital marketing into a performance-based model to offer a whole new experience for shoppers, influencers, brands, and retailers.

Faisal Ahmed, chief executive of Orme, Inc., added: “Orme is more than a marketplace; it is a community where social sharing and referral incentives include and reward shoppers and influencers. This feature not only amplifies brand content but also offers fee earning potential through referrals, leveraging the power of social networks and word-of-mouth marketing.”

For shoppers and influencers, Orme offers a social platform where they can create fun short-form video content, explore fashion, beauty, home, pet, and wellness products, and earn performance-based cash fees for sharing content.

For brands and retailers, the social commerce platform offers “free, simple, and fast integration with all e-commerce platforms and an easy, efficient, and controlled content creation process”. The platform also boasts a personalised AI-powered content and product recommendation engine, a style chatbot, and a content editor filter.

“The short-form video and social commerce market is growing rapidly,” Xcel states. “Affiliate and banner marketing is a 12 billion US dollar market globally, with video shopping projected to be a 35 billion US dollar market in the US in 2024. Social media influencer marketing spend by brands was around 16.4 billion US dollars in 2022 and is increasing at a rate of 18.8 percent per annum.”

With McKinsey and Company statistics revealing that on average, 28 percent of video shopping leads are converted into sales, Orme is looking to capitalise on this with a refreshed look at social video commerce that solves the issues of low conversion rates with affiliate, influencer and digital marketing, and the lack of an end-to-end SFV platform in the US.