We have big news. 

MillerKnoll is launching a major digital partnership with Moro, Applaudable's home furnishings ecommerce retailer.  

As you know, Applaudable's business model is to generate purchase transactions from Applaudable user posts.  Some of those purchases will be fulfilled by third party ecommerce sites owned by  affiliates; and some will be fulfilled by ecommerce sites we own, like Moro.  

And this is big news for Moro.

Miller Knoll is significantly reducing the retailers it sells into – but they just selected Moro as their only new digital retail partner across their extraordinary portfolio of home furnishings brands.  

There are four reasons why this is such a big deal.

1.  Validating Our Strategy.  When Herman Miller acquired Knoll last year, the newly-formed MillerKnoll instantly became the preeminent global leader in modern design, with 11,000 employees, 19 brands sold in more than 100 countries, and a $2.4B market cap.  Their iconic brands include the Herman Miller Aeron office chair, the legendary Eames chair and many more.  They are a global thought leader in the design business. Their partnership with us is a tremendous validator of Moro’s highly-differentiated visual merchandising strategy, and a tremendous validator of Applaudable’s strategy of building a superior social media platform that fosters the sharing of life’s greatest experiences, with the seamless ability to transact from posts – which MillerKnoll cited as instrumental in their decision to partner with us.

 2. Opening Doors for Other Brands.  MillerKnoll has extraordinary influence in the design community.  The definitive global trade show in the furnishings and design business, Salon del Mobile in Milan, Italy, is less than a month away.  With MillerKnoll’s validation, we expect to have a powerful wind at our back in discussions in Milan about acquiring other brands to sell through Moro.  

 3. Opening Doors for Other Ecommerce Categories.  With Moro’s success, we are looking at additional ecommerce categories where we think our groundbreaking visual merchandising approach will enable us to deliver a fundamentally better solution to consumers.  We’ll update you with more specifics on that soon – but our success in attracting the global leader in design to Moro, gives us enormous confidence about our ability to attract similar “category killer” brands in other high touch categories such as jewelry, apparel and footwear that we are considering for our next owned ecommerce sites.

 4.  Financial Impact for Moro.  Finally, we will continue to be conservative in our financial forecasting.  We aren’t going to increase our revenue target for Moro based on this news – yet.  But bringing on the biggest brand in the space should absolutely move the needle for us financially, in a very meaningful way. 

More to come.  

With gratitude,
Andrew Christodoulides
Founder & CEO