Nuji - Shopping made Social and Fun

Nuji lets you remember, share and discover the products you love with like-minded people The bookmarklet allows you to tag products you discover on the web. For example, if you’re at an online store and you see a pair of jeans you like, use the Nuji bookmarklet to tag the pair of jeans and it will be in your Nuji profile. It’s really quick and easy.You can also tag products from the people you are following on your Nuji feed or by clicking one of the products and re-tagging it on the product page.

Dean and Vincent are from agency backgrounds, working in product strategy and business development roles. Anton has been working at Microsoft and Yahoo for the last 10 years. YourStory talks to Nuji about their social shopping platform.

How did Nuji come about?

We had all worked in start-ups before and caught the bug a long time ago. It was hard to shake and we knew there was about to be something pretty revolutionary happening in the social / mobile shopping space.

At the time, nobody seemed to be doing anything special in the social / mobile shopping space which was strange to us because the technology and need was there. We saw it as an opportunity and decided to pursue it before it was too late.

How can people use nuji ?

You can use it for two things. To discover new products from people with similar taste and tag things to remember and share with others both in the real world and online.

Because you follow people with similar taste, you discover what they're discovering and when it comes time to find a new winter jacket or a book to read, you can simply find these things through your Nuji account which is personalised to your taste based on who you're following.

To tag things online, you need to install the Nuji bookmarklet which allows you to tag your favourite products, from all over the web at one click of a button.

To tag an item in the real world, you can scan a products barcode or take a picture with the iPhone. When you scan the items barcode, it automatically identifies the product and retrieves the latest, most relevant information for you. Everything is synced in real time with your account at Nuji.com

The best way to think about it is a mixture of Instagram and Instapaper for shopping.

What was the idea behind this ?

We were frustrated by how hard it was to discover new products. Google, Amazon and Ebay are great once you know what you want, but what about the step before? You can turn to blogs, Twitter and some other tools, but there isn't really a stand-out destination you can go to to discover new products.

Social was a clear way to do this, as we think people generated recommendations will always trump relying completely on algorithms.

Your business model

We're working closely with Levi's and we've had a lot of interest from other brands and retailers. We don't want to compromise the quality or the trust of the community, so if it makes sense for us to work with a brand or retailer and it will make the experience better for our users, we're definitely open to it.

There are a lot of great potential business models. We're looking into quite a few of them but can't talk too much about what route we've chosen to take just yet. We think our users will like it though.

We're definitely interested in talking to more brands and retailers.

Going ahead…….

Our aim is to build a really high quality, simple ecosystem that acts as a shopping mall that's curated by people with similar taste. Once we integrate some key features in both the iPhone app and nuji.com, you'll see us moving into new platforms. We've got some exciting plans ahead.