Nogin, a company that helps brands improve their performance by providing a host of outsourced services, is doing its first acquisition with ModCloth, a year and a half after it had been acquired by retail investment firm Go Global Retail from Walmart. Terms were not disclosed.
Nogin is keeping about 55 ModCloth employees, and ModCloth CMO Mary Jimenez has been named CEO. Team members in buying, brand, design, merchandising, logistics, tech and development, IT, accounting and HR will be based at Nogin’s Tustin, CA headquarters. ModCloth’s customer service team will remain at its Pittsburgh call center.
“ModCloth is an amazing brand poised for growth,” said Jeff Streader, Managing Partner with Go Global Retail, in a release. “We feel very good about the progress at ModCloth since our January 2020 acquisition of the brand from Walmart and are excited to see its momentum continue with Nogin.”
Jan-Christopher Nugent, co-founder and CEO of Nogin, said his company has helped over 200 brands improve their results as much as 3x over the past eight years, including Honeywell, Hurley, Bebe, Lululemon, True Religion, Yeezy and Charming Charlie. Nugent said Nogin has tripled its revenue consecutively over the past five years.
He and his partners saw an opportunity with ModCloth, with its enthusiastic base of younger women shoppers, to free up the brand and help it really take off.
“ModCloth for us is a wonderful place,” said Nugent, a former VP of sales and marketing for Digital River. “Their loyal customer is all about inclusiveness, being body positive and empowering. They have a wonderful vision and messages. They spent a lot of time and energy internally on the hard stuff of ecommerce, which was stifling their growth and profit. For us it’s a great opportunity to put them on the Nogin platform, and free them up to be external with their product and stories and experiences to exponentially drive what they’re doing.”
Nugent said Nogin – which itself recently rebranded after acquiring digital creative agency Zther Interactive and OneStop Commerce – can provide a full-stack solution to smaller retailers including their ecommerce platform, R&D, data and analytics, AI for sales, marketing and fulfillment optimization, merchandising, brand management, customer service, creative and photography, or just one or two components.
“Some (retail and ecommerce brands) want to go DIY and some want to outsource – we sit at the intersection,” he said. “Our mission is to help brands keep pace with the big online retailers who are spending millions and constantly innovating. If someone is smaller, Shopify is fine. If they’re bigger, they can spend more on SalesForce. But there’s a giant hole in the marketplace, where you choose either expensive and rigid or smaller and nimble, but it’s not enterprise class. We’re the best of both worlds, helping in multiple areas.”
Nogin is poised for other brand acquisitions that make sense, Nugent said, through its investment arm Native Brands. Tiger Finance provided acquisition financing for the ModCloth deal – as it did for Go Global – and Tiger Valuation Services is providing inventory analytics support.
ModCloth Acquired by Nogin from Go Global
