Start up Series: Tictail
Every month, entrepreneurcountry showcases a new start-up company taking their sector by storm. Here, co-founder of Tictail, Carl Waldekranz (pictured, far left), shares his story.
“
ecommerce platform. A big ambition, I know, but one that we believe is possible.
M
Tictail is an ecommerce platform that allows entrepreneurs and retailers to set up a beautifully designed online store quickly and easily – and most importantly, for free. Having launched in Stockholm in 2012, there are now around 18,000 Tictail stores in countries all over the world, including around 2,500 in the UK.
Starting a Tictail store entails no transactions or startup costs, but users can pay for add-ons and apps as and when their store grows and they need additional functionality.
Essentially,
a Tictail store is able to grow with a business, developing as it expands. Many apps, such as the
custom
domain and discount code apps, are built in house, but we are now opening up the platform as Apple did with their app store. This allows developers to create and market their own apps and tools within the Tictail platform, with a 30% commission rate for all sales.
I founded Tictail with Birk Nilson, Kaj Drobin and Siavash Ghorbani, and one of the central principles behind the
24 entrepreneurcountry
y aim is for Tictail to become the world’s biggest and most loved
platform is the idea that ecommerce is a place where business and design should meet. I thought that it was strange that you could sit on a plane and have a video conversation on an iPad with someone on the other side of the world, and yet at the same time, setting up an online shop that is beautiful and doesn’t cost a fortune was almost impossible. Hence, how Tictail came into being. I believe that there is no reason why business technology cannot be as simple and straight- forward to use as the consumer-facing technology we have come to accept as a part of our everyday lives (such as Skype and Facebook), and this is what I hope we have achieved with Tictail.
Having originally set up a design company called Super Strikers with Kaj Drobin at the age of 18, we soon started working on the branding for another small start up at the time – Spotify. It was while working with Spotify that we met our third Tictail co-founder, Birk, who politely declined a job offer to join our team at Super Strikers at the time! As Spotify grew, one of Sweden’s largest branding agencies, Identity Works, bought Super Strikers, allowing us to focus on our next move.
Kaj and I continued working on design for e-commerce clients, and this time,
we were able to convince Birk to come join us on our next adventure. For me, e-commerce was so interesting because traditionally, the message and the action have been separate: you’d have a poster saying ‘Buy Shoes!’ and then the action was that you’d have to go to a store to buy them. From a design standpoint, however, e-commerce sees the communication and the action converge perfectly.
For six months, we put half of our salaries into a joint savings account, while setting up in my kitchen from
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