With Spring, an attempt to make the brick

Earlier this summer venture investor David Tisch revealed a pedigreed list of investors from the fashion and tech worlds, who poured $7.5 million into his mysterious stealth shopping app, Spring. Today we learn more about the app, which launched on iOS. The premise is 'shopping as entertainment,' a lofty goal which many startups have gone after, but almost none have quite nailed.

Companies from OpenSky and Fancy to Wanelo, WantWorthy and a hundred small ones you've never heard of, have all tried to take the analog experience of browsing a shopping mall and bring it online. Fab.com, the design-centric online furniture store, might have come closest, with its shoppable Pinterest-like news feed. The idea was to get people to scroll through images of products while their were bored on their phones, with a simple single tap to buy. At one point, Fab's news feed was driving twice as many purchases as Fab's homepage. But then the wheels fell off at Fab, and the company will likely sell for a pittance of its $1 billion valuation.

Spring aims to build on the lessons of Fab, and the others, which Tisch say lacked selection, a variety of price points, and did not let brands control the experience. Tisch, along with his younger brother Alan Tisch, have spent the last year building Spring with a team of 32 people in New York. The app itself is beautifully designed and dangerously simple to shop from. But the real key to Spring's success, if it does become a success, will be Spring's relationships with fashion brands.

The company hired April Uchitel, a fashion-industry vet who was most recently at DVF, as its Chief Brand Officer. Over the last year and a half, Uchitel and team Spring have painstakingly convinced 450 apparel brands to sell their wares on the app. Spring's value proposition is that the brands have complete customization and control over the look and the shopping experience in the app. (The brands handle shipping, logistics and customer support.) Spring takes a 'fraction' of the 10% cut on sales taken by affiliate marketplaces like Amazon, Tisch says. And Spring is integrated with Shopify, Magento, Stripe and other e-commerce software providers, allowing brands five different ways to plug their inventory into the app. Further, everything on Spring is shoppable, as the site doesn't include user-generated content. As a result, brands from Opening Ceremony to Rebecca Minkoff have signed on. For at least 30 of the brands, including Marchesa and Thakoon, Spring is their first foray into direct-to-customer e-commerce.

It's surprising that luxury brands like Proenza Schouler would happily position themselves in a feed that includes more casual brands like Levi's or Warby Parker. Normally Dior would refuse to be in the same shopping mall as an H&M. But Spring has purposely embraced 'high-low' because its customers shop from both luxury and down-market brands. 'Brands want to be where their customers are, and they understand their customers are high-low customers,' Tisch says.