Company Profile
OOOOO
Things that make you go
OOOOO
The way consumers find, appraise and purchase product is changing rapidly, as highlighted by the arrival of the innovative new ‘entertainment commerce’ platform OOOOO. With Toys.tv one of OOOOO’s Top 3 channels, and the ThreeSixty Group – owner of FAO Schwarz - on board as a leading partner, this unique proposition seems certain to shake up how toys (and much more) are bought and sold. Toy World spoke to Sam Jones, OOOOO co-founder, Jan-Eric Kloth, president, Retail, International Wholesale & Corporate Strategy, ThreeSixty Group, and David Ripley, who has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the retail toy channel, now category lead for Toys.tv, to find out what OOOOO offers, how it works and why toy companies should get involved.
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Sam Jones
he OOOOO premise is deceptively simple. Named for the universally recognised noise people make when they receive something ordered in the post and open it to find that it is every bit as brilliant as they hoped it would be, the mobile app-based entertainment commerce platform lets users watch content and buy the products featured quickly and easily by tapping on an icon that adds it to their basket. If QVC and TikTok had a baby, it would probably look something like OOOOO. It is arguably unfair to use other apps to describe OOOOO, as it’s a far more multi-faceted affair than the elevator pitch above would have you believe. The Toy World Team has been exploring the app before this month’s hard launch (necessary research, you understand), and it’s certainly a slick, accessible and intuitive offering. As explained by co-founder Sam Jones, who has spent a long time living in Hong
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Kong and Singapore, the Chinese marketplace has been a major source of inspiration for his creation, which has been co-created with Eric Zhang. There, mobile phones are at the heart of consumerism, and the technology is significantly more advanced than that seen in the likes of the UK. Video technology in particular has come on leaps and bounds in the previous few years; TikTok, Douyin in China, revolves around short pre-recorded and live user-generated broadcasts, and is wildly popular among Chinese consumers. As a result, there are many companies out there looking to harness the demand for content and bring it into the retail space. Some in the Far East are already doing so, such as Pindoudou, the largest agriculture-focused technology platform in China, and Kuaishou, the region’s second biggest short-form video platform, but both are geographically and/or categorically constrained. And that’s where OOOOO, with its 40+ channels (some still under construction), covering
