On the website, it is possible to search for everything from new brands and designers for items on sale, like those two piece prom dresses for 2023.

The startup is co-founded by a team of four entrepreneurs, including Ida Adler-Olsen and Kasper Vardrup. Ida has a past at the enterprise social network startup echo-it, and Kasper is the founder of phone recycling startup GreenWire as well as co-founder of the Startup Bootcamp accelerator and partner at Rainmaking. The team has already received a first funding of € 300 000 from Rainmaking.

“As of June we are live in Denmark and England, having spent almost a year in development. Our service finds fashion items from the biggest stores and brands, and already over 1 million items are listed.” says Kasper.

Just as companies like Boliga and Momondo have made ​​it easy to search across agencies and airlines, The Fashion wants to create transparency in the market of online fashion.

“Our goal is to make it easier to chase coveted products and easy to compare the factors that define a good buy for customer. ” says Ida

On the site you can easily compare prices between different retailers, including shipping and return conditions. You can also customise your own shop and get alerts when interesting new brands or products are on sale. The team reports that the site was launched simultaneously in Denmark and England and will initially only cover fashion for women, but in the autumn mens collections will be added as well.

The post Serial entrepreneurs launching a new search engine for fashion appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Madsen was kind enough to have an interview with me.

For what reasons do you prefer working with the more visionary, developmental side to the business as “Chief Storyteller” compared with the more bureaucratic side?
 

“Well to me it was very much another world if you work with the bureaucratic side, you have to be able to make really fast and quick decisions and if you are bootstrapping for a long time it gets harder and harder. It takes another type of creative energy to work with the more bureaucratic side as well but to be on the ball and always focusing. After all I am only human and I can only do one of two things. After we sat there and had a good talk about it and I thought about it, I realized it actually made more sense for me to work on the visionary and creative side so we came to the conclusion that we did. We’re excited about it and that I can now focus on the product and focus on getting us to the next level in terms of what I do and what I want to do.”

Holding a M.Sc. in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, Madsen graduated in the top tier. Madsen has worked with the Danish Ministry of Business affairs and Economics and has been the CFO in Actimizer.

What moves have you planned to take next in your new roll?

“First of all, we launched a product we were excited about that we were experimenting on and there’s going to be a lot more focus about that on our external social media platforms. We’ll also do a lot more general speaking engagement and look forward to being way more on the ball in terms of what our mission is and what we are trying to achieve five years down the line and what choices we have to make now. I want to try to make that reality of five years into three years. I think that’s a really important decision.”

Do you have any ideas what kind of effects the change in leadership will have on the users?

“I don’t think the end users will experience it that much, I think that we have a pretty good product right now and we will continue to do so and hopefully it will be even more interesting of course, but I think it’s more in terms of the business that there’s going to be a lot of changes. I think there’s going to be a lot more professionalism and a lot more execution and focus on actually building a proper company so to speak, whereas before it wasn’t really 100%.”

In a post published on Echo.it’s own blog, Madsen details the motives of the change. After having bootstrapped for many years and gradually building up their consumer base over five continents, Madsen felt it was appropriate to pass on the “paperwork” so to say to one of their investors; Könnecker. Könnecker has an impressive record of helping firms grow and has forward-thinking dreams for the future. The change was a mutual and positive decision.

In what ways do you believe Lutz Könnecker will lead the firm in contrast to your leadership?

“Lutz has a lot more experience that I don’t have and I think he’s going to be bringing that to us as well. He’s also very focused on the cash flow and all of these things that you need to be focused on. Unlike me, he analyzes things before and he only acts when it makes a lot of sense and in that position you have to wait a little bit. I think now that definitely we will begin to see a lot of changes but only for the better!”

So how does it work?

Echo.it is an enterprising social network with a purpose. Its purpose is to reestablish and strengthen the bond of communication and productivity between the employees of a business. It helps translate company goals, values and strategies into action. In addition, it creates better data-points for implementing and executing corporate strategies. Through the service Echo.it provides, employees and management belong to a private company platform where they are able to share their actions.

Employees can first share their real time actions with their colleagues. A post called an “echo” is published detailing the employee’s moves and can also be tagged with the matching relevant sector of the business. Other colleagues can quickly find echos to read by searching with the tags. Colleagues are able to like and comment on each other’s echos, furthering the level of efficient communication. The power of inspiration is a central theme within the online service; effectiveness is improved by colleagues continuously inspiring each other. Furthermore, employees are motivated to an even larger extent through the use of rewards; badges accumulated with the fulfillment of various tasks. The management also has the power to individually reward employees with personalized awards. Besides providing a social platform for the employees of a company, Echo.it automatically aggregates their social activity into statistical data. The use of charts and such is perfect for analytical data gathering by the management. From the statistical insights and the postings of echos, the management is fully aware of the efficiency of their employees. As well as that, they are kept up to date on the implementation of their strategic goals. They are able to narrow down their potential weaknesses in order to work on eliminating them and promote desired behaviour.

We hope that the change of leadership will bring nothing but positive developments to Echo.it!

The post Stefan Madsen on Echo.it’s new CEO and his role as Chief Storyteller appeared first on Øresund Startups.

It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

The post Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“The idea came half a year to a year ago. I have background in private equity funds and know how efficient Board may be if done well. So I talked to Kristian Holte, and he had the same thoughts. Later Lars Torpe came across. For a long time he has been tired of the way the board functions in general, so we decided to combine our efforts” explains Stefan K. Madsen to Trendsonline.

The goal of the website is to provide entrepreneurs with useful information about effective board work. Among other things it will also be a reporting site and a place to look for useful webtools. The website is registerested at the Startupboardroom.com domain and will be run in English.

The post A new blog about startup boards is coming this May appeared first on Øresund Startups.