Modwalla

Modwalla is a B2B marketplace for made-on-demand products connecting providers and merchants. Made-on-Demand (MOD) products can be anything printed, engraved, embroidered, stitched, decorated, built. Initially, we are going to focus on Print and Engraved on Demand.   www.modwalla.com

As a marketplace, there are buyers and sellers. For Modwalla, we are using the terms Providers and Merchants. Here is what we mean by Provider and Merchant.

Providers are businesses that print, engrave, and/or embroider products and ship the order to an end customer.

Merchants are businesses that have e-commerce storefronts where they sell to their end customers and use drop-ship fulfillment as a part of their supply chain.

A typical made-on-demand merchant & provider interaction.

It can take 6 months for a single product to get launched!

Once a merchant decides on the product assortment, the hard part in the made-on-demand industry is just finding a provider that can make and fulfill the product that you want.  Providers are great at making products.  They aren't great at having their website SEO friendly with all of their products listed, either.  

Assuming a match is made, the back and forth interactions take a lot of time and the order routing can get very expensive.  

For each Provider <-> Merchant connection, to efficiently send and receive orders an integration needs to be setup. Each integration can cost between $2k - $15k, and typically is for a handful of product listings.

So, who is Modwalla?

Chris has been in the made-on-demand products industry for 10+ years, and has been a provider (Cerealize - custom breakfast cereal ingredients and boxes; PhotoBall - custom sports balls), a merchant (Zazzle - I determined what products to launch and sourced providers for contract work), and as a marketplace operator (Zazzle - maker.zazzle.com for letting providers list and sell on zazzle.com). He has seen and experienced the need for more sales channels for providers that entire time AND has experienced wanting greater democratization of MOD products for merchants.

Greg has been architecting and developing full-stack solutions for over 12 years. He is formerly the co-founder and CTO of Recart, an ecommerce marketing automation system which helps e-commerce companies win back customers and increase revenue by using Facebook Messenger. Recart has generated $120,000,000+ extra revenue for its customers thus far.

How big is this opportunity?

The drop shipping market is expected to approach $500 Billion by 2026. A subset of that is the Print On Demand market. This is how the current competitors are being valued and seen. That subset is expected to grow upwards of $12 Billion in that same timeframe.

What does Modwalla know that the competition does not? How are we seeing the market?

There is not one single open marketplace option available for providers to list ALL of their products and connect with merchants. Not one.

We believe that a provider driven marketplace for made-on-demand products will increase the offerings available for merchants, increase access to merchants of all sizes, and give merchants and their customers more and better choice.

Enter Modwalla: a provider-driven marketplace for made-on-demand products.

Providers will create product listings for all of the MOD products in their catalog through a seller dashboard.  In 5 minutes, a product can be listed on Modwalla.

Merchants can search for the exact product they want, see complete product details, generate mockups instantly, and list a product on their storefront with a single click.

That 6 month product launch sequence will take minutes.  And, that 1 product listing by the Provider can be leveraged by millions of merchants around the world and incorporated into their MOD supply chain.

How does Modwalla make money?

Marketplace commissions (15%) are the primary revenue source, paid for by the seller (no different than Amazon).

Secondary and tertiary revenue streams are possible through subscriptions by both marketplace participants, providers and merchants. Seller subscriptions have been shown by the likes of Amazon and Etsy to fetch between $10 - $40 / month. Merchant subscriptions have been shown effective by competitors like Printful and Printify, ranging $25 - $49 / month.  These revenue streams will come after years 3-5.

And, a possible quaternary revenue stream via an onsite ad network.  

What does Modwalla need to make this happen?