Startup Series: Meet xNomad

Watch the video to find out how CEO of xNomad Jonathan Haralambakis built a marketplace for short-term retail space.

Short-term leases is an exceptionally cumbersome process for property managers, and for brands, it's nearly impossible to find a space in a short term. To solve these issues, Jonathan and Leslie founded xNomad, a marketplace that matches brands and entrepreneurs with well-suited short-term spaces to create more vibrant communities.

What makes xNomad unique is the data that they offer brands in understanding their customers, which also makes a great opportunity for landlords to understand which brand matches their space.

Transcript

Jonathan Haralambakis: One in ten stores are empty globally. In the Nordics alone there are over 20 000 vacant spaces. For property managers, it's an exceptionally cumbersome process to do short-term leases. And for brands, it's nearly impossible to find a space in the short term. What we are doing we're matching brands and entrepreneurs with these amazing short-term spaces to create more vibrant communities and better experiences for customers, landlords, brands and everyone.

The reason why now is that we see the power of omnipresence and as people, we are craving convenience, experience and different community feelings. With pop-up shops that's possible and we don't just see this just happening with fashion, we see it with tech and food as well. We want to make that very convenient and easy one click from your desk and you can do your entire pop-up campaign.

So what makes xNomad so unique is our data. We offer brands unique data in understanding the customer so they are able to look at footfall, gender, propensity to spend and dwell time. On a micro level, we're really able to understand exactly how customers interact in the store, and then you can see how long they dwell, and understand exactly what they're looking at. The best part of it is that landlords can understand this opportunity so they can find out which brand matches their space.

A really cool example is Voi, they use their offline presence as a way to drive their growth and to go into new markets. A recent one that they did was a safety campaign. They had graffiti artist; they had a pimp you helmet campaign and it drove their community of users but also people from the street that discovered them and interacted with them about their safety campaign.

What makes xNomad a really interesting business model is the fact that we are a very asset-light company, we take 20 percent commission from the seller or landlord, and we also make auxiliaries revenues through our design, marketing and material partners. So we are able to be very asset-light, expand into a number of different markets and really gain traction through these alternative revenue streams

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