Della & James go after the bridal registry market
An e-commerce company is born
By Colleen Bazdarich, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 8:38 AM ET Jun 22, 1999
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Last Spring, Jenny Lefcourt and Jessica DiLullo finished their first year at business school. Now, they're breaking new ground in the $17 billion bridal registry market as founders and vice presidents of Della&James.
The company started a year ago when the two women developed the idea for an entrepreneurship contest at Stanford Business School. Since then, Della&James has grown into a hot new Internet startup with 50 employees, including CEO Rebecca Patton, formerly of E-Trade (EGRP: news, msgs).
With the launch of the Della&James Web site this month, Lefcourt and DiLullo have set out to add style and convenience to the sometimes harrowing world of wedding gift registry. The company has teamed up with Williams-Sonoma (WSM: news, msgs), Neiman Marcus (NMG: news, msgs), Dillards (DDS: news, msgs) and Crate & Barrel to offer registry online from well-known national retailers. The site also offers unique gifts, from REI camping equipment and American Express Gift Cheques to local spa treatments.
Couples can manage and edit their registry from the site, and wedding guests can make purchases online. The information received on Della&James is updated, often in real time, with the registry of the retail stores. Along with the free online registry, Della&James offers a product guide, wedding-planning advice and a wedding shop. CBS.MW's Colleen Bazdarich talked with Lefcourt and DiLullo about the "amazing" year they've had, from creating a marketable idea to watching their "Internet baby" learn to walk.
The company started at Stanford Business School?
DiLullo: Jenny and I met early in school and both wanted to do a startup. We saw each other in all the same entrepreneurial meetings. The impetus was a contest, "Entrepreneurial Challenge," they have at Stanford. You develop a business and present it to a panel of judges and go through series of rounds that would ultimately get you $25,000 in funding. We met during that process and started talking about an idea for an online bridal registry that we were both really excited about.
Do you remember how you first thought of that idea?
Lefcourt: We both had the idea before we actually met up. We were doing it more for the Business School competition and we thought "Well, what would be interesting?" We had both of thought of the idea separately and for various reasons decided not to pursue it. We got together and started working on it.
DiLullo: We had taken slightly different approaches to it but then immediately had that one idea and put the two concepts together and came up with the idea for Della&James.
What were the two angles from which you came at it?
Lefcourt: The idea I had wasn't even a Web-based service. It was just that people registering weren't able to get the things that matched their lifestyle today. People should be able to get dinners out to fancy restaurants as much as they should be able to get fine china.
DiLullo: I came at it from an e-commerce applications standpoint of aggregating information and having price and availability in one place, a good application of that being what people wanted for their wedding. Not so much from the breadth of product standpoint that Jenny came at it from. So I was for the convenience that the Internet can do. Putting that together was our idea.
So you won the contest at the Stanford Business School?
DiLullo: It was one of things where everyone was a winner. We were laughing as we sat in the auditorium and all the winners came on stage and there was no one left in the audience. During that first round, Dave Wharton, an associate at Kleiner Perkins, was one of the judges and pulled our plan out. He said, "Wow, this is a really good idea." He contacted us after the first round. Thus started a series of conversations that ultimately led to our funding in May (1998). We decided to pull our plan out of the contest because we were taking it seriously and we didn't want to circulate the idea too widely.
What made your idea so appealing? Why do you think Dave Wharton was interested?
DiLullo: Looking at Della&James, our approach of fixing the online bridal network was about bridging the gap between the off-line world and the online world. People can still go into the stores they know and love and they get all the choice and selection as well as adding on unique gifts and have it all centralized on one place on the the Internet.
Lefcourt: I think one of the reasons we were able to come up with it was because we were real users. We were many-times bridesmaids. I had just been married. We started looking at this from the consumer point of view and we said "Let's put technology aside, let's put reality aside, what do people want this to be?" We started there and then finally we started to say "Well, could we get the retailers involved and can we build it?" Whereas, I think sometimes people come at the Web with a technology company, and say "Look at what technology can do, cool. Who needs the retailers? We can just intermediate them. We'll do what Amazon did to books to the wedding market." But because we were so consumer-driven, being consumers in the market, we were like "Well, we don't believe in that model." We came at it from a different angle.
DiLullo: You can very easily sit in a box and play with Excel and come up with a great business plan for a different appraoch. But then we look at each other and say "Well, would you register that way?"
Lefcourt: That was always our end-all litmus test "Would you do it?" No! Then we knew to go back to the drawing board.
So you were doing this all from Stanford?
DiLullo: Yeah. From the library. We started conversations with a series of the retailers while we were at Stanford. We started to do some initial sales to make sure we had proof of concept that we would form partnerships in this area as well as flesh out the rest of the model.
So how did you get from Stanford to here?
DiLullo: It's been a long road!
Lefcourt: We were at Stanford last year. Just as our first year ended we got funding from Kleiner, so we left school and from there started working really hard on getting retailers on board and doing everything we needed to do. That was the first hurdle.We brought Rebecca Patton on as president and CEO in January of this year. That was just a coup for us. She was the senior vice president of E-Trade and has just great branding and marketing experience.
DiLullo: As soon as we got funded and Kleiner Perkins gave us the green light they gave us keys to this little office on University Avenue (in Palo Alto). Jenny and I went down there and poked our heads in the window and were so excited that we were actually going to get to do it. We had been in this pre-funding stage where all you think about is how you are going to get going on the business, and now we could actually just get going on the business. We went in there and had the two of us. We grew out from there and now we are almost 50 people. It has been a crazy growth trajectory where every day seems to pick up more momentum and makes us go faster and faster and gets stronger and stronger.
Lefcourt: We are so focused on what's ahead, but every now and again we will look at eachother and say, "Wow, this is amazing!"
What did you take with you from business school to the business world?
Lefcourt: I can't think of a particular class that taught me something that I couldn't learn otherwise. It is just about turning your brain on, being intellectually challenged by your smart professors and your smart classmates, that puts you in a great frame of mind to be creative and not afraid of going for things. It is a great place to use as a launching pad.
DiLullo: It really is the ability to focus on something. Every class we had we applied that right away to what we were doing with Della&James. We thought, "Well, what would that mean in terms of our business?"
Lefcourt: I wish I could say a good game of golf!
DiLullo: Yeah, a good game of golf … but we were too busy!
What did you learn in the business world that school could not teach you?
DiLullo: One of things that has been a wonderful surprise is that you would be amazed at what you can accomplish if you just try. That is something that the real world can teach you because it is only by doing it that you realize how far you can get by sheer will. That has been a great lesson … If you want it as bad as we do … you can get a long way in making it happen.
Lefcourt: I think the other lesson for me was … I don't want to belittle the power of an idea, but I think we have learned that it is all about execution. A lot of people have had this idea and we have this idea. But what is going to make it and separate it and make it everything that we want it to be is all about execution, executing flawlessly.
So what did you do right in your execution?
Lefcourt: I think the first thing that we did right was hire amazing people. The people that have joined Della&James. Every single last person is super bright, has great experience and brings so much. I think bringing in the right team to then execute and make smart decisions every single day is probably the biggest thing that we did.
The site just was launched this month. What kind of response have you had so far?
DiLullo: Terrific. I mean it's been great. We have a little beeper that goes off when someone does a sale and it is now starting to annoy people because it is going off all the time.
Lefcourt: Which is all we dreamed of… It is great to actually see it up. We have been working so hard for a year and a half on this. You knew what it was but you couldn't really talk about what it was, you couldn't show anyone what it was, and here it is and people are actually using it and loving it. It's amazing.
DiLullo: We actually do a little dance to the beeper sound because it is so exciting. It is going really well. All of our partners are incredibly happy, all of our customers have had an overwhelmingly positive response. We are very excited to be live. We had this joke that we were about ten months prgenant. We were so ready to get this thing live and out to the world.
Lefcourt: I would say this has probably been the most exciting year of my life. Constant go go go. It is so fun and so stimulating. It has become an obsession.
DiLullo: It is clearly the best obsession I have ever had.
Colleen Bazdarich is a reporter for CBS MarketWatch |
