Grabble

Grabble – Daniel Murray

Daniel Murray’s Grabble is the new ‘Tinder for Fashion’ app created to save users the hassle of searching for the latest fashionable trends by bringing specially-curated outfit tips direct to the phone.

Grabble was initially launched in 2014, by Daniel and his business partner Joel Freeman, as a social commerce website to fill the empty space between Pinterest and ASOS by helping users save their favourite fashion products.

The 29-year-old graduate, from the University of Nottingham, narrates his journey from leaving university during the recession period to running 2 previous startups and how he ended up with Grabble.

“Nothing helps to get you to the other side more than hard work”

“I left university with a 2.1 in English and Art History in the recession of 2007 and there were no jobs and no funding, which wasn’t ideal for me so I worked in a pub.

Reflecting back, I feel that University was a waste of my time. I always got top grades but had to work incredibly hard to get them because it wasn’t very natural for me to achieve in comparison to my peers.

I’ve always had a go-getter attitude so whilst working at the pub, I ended up convincing someone who ran an advertising agency to let me work for him as his apprentice for free.

I worked my way up the company and then started my own small boutique agency with my old boss when he left. I created a product within the agency with my current business partner but it didn’t really excite us – Advertising was too steady for my liking.

I went on to create a daily deal site with Joel, which ran for 6 months and was lucrative but we hated the industry so it was closed down. We invested the proceeds into research for Grabble.

Grabble
Curated by Cherry Collins – Formerly of Grazia, Selfridges and NET-A-PORTER.

Grabble is a curated daily edit of the best of fashion, lifestyle and beauty products, handpicked by our team of expert stylists and ready to buy in just a tap on your phone.

We first launched Grabble as a social commerce website by trying to link up the points between Pinterest and ASOS – Users would get a ‘Grab’ button, similar to a ‘pin’ button and save their favourite fashion products from other sites back to ours and get sale alerts.

“If you aren’t willing to give it your all then it’s very hard to succeed”

We did that for a year and were able to make £350,000. We knew very little about fashion e-commerce realistically and even less about tech so it was a huge learning curve for us.

By the end of that 12 months, we were pretty much out of money and had very few active users who loved what we were doing so we decided to change.

We prototyped a few different apps and tested these on a few number of people – An Instagram for fashion; Tumblr for fashion; Twitter for fashion and Tinder for fashion. The most popular was the Tinder concept, which went viral and then led to the launch of the mobile app in 2015.

Grabble
Mixing Fashion + Tech

I like to think of Grabble as a mobile publishing business creating the best in class experiences for its users on mobile and no reason why we can’t expand out of fashion.

Daniel Murray, Co-founder at Grabble
Daniel Murray, Grabble Co-Founder

The last 2 years has been the most stressful, tough, often lonely and incredibly antisocial times of my life but by far the best and most fulfilling.

The single most valuable commodity and challenge for any entrepreneur isn’t really money but time.

You can be in control of giving yourself more of it but you have to align your interests, ambition and be committed to winning.

You need to be able to handle the pressure, the financial burden, be willing to work long hours and take no salary – Even consider moving back in with your parents.

If you aren’t willing to give it your all then it’s very hard to succeed. Nothing helps to get you to the other side more than hard work, energy, effort and passion.”

Grabble

Pictures – Grabble.

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