RewardStyle is rebranding to LTK, the acronym for its popular shopping app, formerly known as Liketoknow.it.
The rebrand comes as the company celebrates 10 years on the market and a banner year in sales. Last year, LTK reached $2.8 billion in influencer-driven purchases, with $1 billion worth of product sold in the first half of 2020.
“LTK is candidly what our clients have called us,” said Amber Venz Box, LTK’s cofounder and president. “It was a slang name, and we felt we could adopt that to simplify.”
LTK’s rebrand is meant to make the company, which consists of both an influencer platform and shopping app, appear more unified to clients as it enters a period of expansion. Already it has surpassed 100 hires in 2021, all of whom are working remotely, with plans for international growth later this year.
“That’s not on the back of any sort of raise, that’s all self-funded,” Venz Box said of the new hires.
Many of the new hires will join LTK’s product and engineering team, which accounts for the majority of the company’s 350 employees. That team is tasked with materializing Venz Box’s vision for LTK to be what she called “Shopify for creators.”
“The business has been in a really great place and we want to invest in the future,” Venz Box said. “Part of what we think that future looks like is for creators to have and own their own world-class shop. As part of this hiring, we’re building out a vision for essentially being the Shopify for creators — building a world-class e-commerce platform that allows [creators] to bring customers into their store for the customers to discover, gain confidence in the purchase, find out everything they need to know and ultimately, transact there.”
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Creators will not “have to hold any sort of inventory, they will ship no boxes,” Venz Box said. “They will be able to host an e-commerce experience where they own their customer [and] traffic and are still in partnership with brands available on LTK.”
LTK counts more than 100,000 creators in more than 100 countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, China, South Korea and Brazil. It is heavily investing in technology that will allow its creators to make their existing content more easily searchable and, thus, shoppable.
“How are [creators] going to continue to build out in a way that takes them less time to do the things that they’re doing,” Venz Box said.
Last year LTK rolled out a cloud-based brand portal meant to allow the company’s highest-spending retail partners to monitor influencer campaigns in real time. LTK is now testing a self-service platform for brands with budgets of all sizes.
“Brands can come in and use these enterprise tools on their own to cast, price and execute their own campaigns,” Venz Box said. “We just had our beta test, and now, over the next two months, we’re rolling it out to the entire network.”
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