The logo of Holler Commerce is that of a coyote, but it could easily have been of a chameleon instead.
That’s because on Monday, GoWild — a Louisville-based social media community and e-commerce platform in the outdoor sporting goods space — unveiled its spinoff company on a LinkedIn post from Brad Luttrell, the co-founder and CEO of GoWild.
Holler Commerce is billed as “a turnkey, AI-powered social commerce platform,” according to Luttrell’s post, that can work behind the scenes of any brand with an online shop or e-commerce site without the user knowing it is being run through that platform.
Amenities include access to SEO “juice” from thousands of indexable pages and a national network of warehouses built on the foundation of previous partnerships established by GoWild, which should reach 100,000-products in its own system by late September.
“It’s going to be branded,” Luttrell told me recently in an interview. “It’s going to have [the clients’] look and feel. They have that interaction with their customer now and immediately turn on a strong revenue stream … What we’re doing is finding brands right now that have significant audience or cult-like following — or both — and we’re offering them a chance to add a revenue stream and also build community.”
Holler will have a monthly fee for partnering businesses, but the financial details are still being worked out — as are the initial contracts with the inaugural group of partners. The platform’s base revenue will come from a gross-margin split between Holler and the partners/clients, Luttrell said, who added that the expectation is that the contracts are at least for a year. Thus far, there have been two verbal commitments and two dozen inquiries.
A parental projection
Similar to the narrative of Lexington-based Leadrilla and its spinoff company SalesRiver in the insurtech space that was announced in February, the plan is for one day for Holler Commerce to go from a spinoff to the parent company where GoWild is the flagship product.
“It’s always going to be our sandbox … because we can test there [and] we can try things there,” said Luttrell of GoWild, the company he founded in 2017 with Zack Grimes, Donovan Sears and Chris Gleim.
In 2022, GoWild, headquartered at 2351 Nelson Miller Parkway in East Louisville, was named as one of our 2022 Startups to Watch. Luttrell said the company, which has 11 full-time and 14 part-time employees, is on pace to triple its revenue for the third consecutive year. Furthermore, in the first quarter the company had a year-over-year growth of 110%.
It should be noted that these numbers do not include one of the possible partners that Holler is in contact with, which is projected to represent a seven-figure increase in 12-month revenue for every contract signed, said Luttrell, who was also named to our Forty Under 40 list in 2021.
Luttrell added that the total GoWild’s users number in the “hundreds of thousands.” Last season, during its peak time during the third and fourth quarter (hunting and fishing season), it had approximately 500,000 users.
In Q&A with Business First for the Startups to Watch feature back in January 2022, GoWild first mentioned the term “Silicon Holler,” given that all of the founders were from either rural Kentucky or Indiana. At that point, the company said it had raised around $6 million, with local investments from Render Capital and Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. (KSTC). GoWild also a graduate of Endeavor's Scale Up program.
And, getting back to the coyote logo, Luttrell added that “holler” is also connected to the sounds produced by coyotes, given how much they communicate with one another when in packs.
“I love the coyote. I think the coyote is one of the coolest animals in North America,” he said. “They’re survivalists. They can adapt to any situation just like a startup has to do, and they’re very clever. They are very resourceful.”
The start of an idea
Luttrell said that the idea of Holler Commerce first came to light in 2019 when it launched a product called Gearbox on its app that allowed members to tag the gear that they were using, allowing GoWild to collect marketing data from its affiliates.
The GoWild team, though, quickly realized that there was no “one-stop shop” for affiliate data, forcing them to construct a product that would aggregate that data.
Shortly thereafter, one of its board members, Jack Danehy said he thought there could be added value with this new product — a back-end technology that can aggregate data from warehouses across the country, while allowing users to both tag and buy gear — that extended beyond GoWild as a white-label product.
“The realization came pretty quick that we should really look at how we would spin this out as a B2B product,” Luttrell said.
Luttrell and his colleagues began conceptualizing the product in 2019. In 2021, they started to build it out in a way that would be best suited for a white-label product.
He added that social media titan Instagram had just started the ability for users to tag brands in their posts to create an “aggregation of community content,” a feature that GoWild started to offer in 2019.
“That’s what everybody is missing is the value of community commerce or social commerce,” he said.
The AI component comes into play through a chatbot who will talk to customers and will produce a product catalog that is supported by communal data that has been collected over the years.
“So all of this is really like the future of what we see as commerce: The community helping people shop smarter beyond review," Luttrell said.
As luck would have it, GoWild was working on another unrelated, larger project at the end of last year that involved Luttrell reaching out to the leadership teams of large brands in the outdoor sporting goods space. One undisclosed brand that did not have a customer-facing, e-commerce platform on its site was immediately interested in forming a partnership.
“The conversation kept coming back around to how we would launch it and the more I thought about it, it just had to be its own brand,” Luttrell said.
Holler Commerce’s focus will start in the outdoor gear space, but Lutrell said the “scalability of Holler is infinitely larger” than GoWild, given how it can easily move to in what he called “natural evolutions” such as youth sports, fitness and golf.
“Just imagine anywhere you can shop you know, and anywhere you can build community,” Luttrell said of the possible categories of future clientele. “We’ve always seen underserved outdoor verticals as our first step, and so we’re really focused on that space right now.”
But dare I say that Holler Commerce is poised to, err, go wild?
