It’s time to shop for holiday presents, and Mountain View’s TheFind.com can help you find them.
CEO Siva Kumar told me that he co-founded TheFind Inc. four years ago when he saw how long it took his wife to shop online for children’s clothing. Along with some Stanford engineers, he believed he could create a better search engine. TheFind.com goes beyond indexing pages: It searches 200 million product listings and indexes stores and goods by price, brand and color.
Siva told me that, since December 2006, clothing sales have outpaced electronics sales on the Web, according to Forrester Research. So TheFind started by focusing on fashions for children and adults. In addition, it now covers home, kids, sports, kitchen, shoes, beauty and jewelry products. With another Mountain View company, Krillion, it has added electronics and household appliances. You can search by category and find garden tools, musical instruments and car accessories.
Despite a faltering economy, TheFind has seen sales grow as people search for bargains. TheFind.com is not an online store like Amazon.com, instead it is a search engine for online stores and organizes the search results into a page of pictures. It shows pictures and prices of both new and pre-owned items. Mousing over the picture reveals more information. I was tempted to buy some vintage Ferragamo shoes advertised at $7.
You can search within a price range and ZIP code. I searched in Mountain View for a teapot and found one designed by Sophie Conran, daughter of British designer Sir Terence Conran. The nearest store that offered it was Bed, Bath and Beyond. It gave the phone number so that I could check whether the Mountain View store actually had the teapot in stock.
If you search locally, TheFind.com will show stores on a map, and they can be ranked by distance or relevance. Most of the stores, but not all, are large chains. Smaller merchants will lose out if they don’t have a Web site.
The local search feature needs a bit of work, as it could use a smoother user experience, greater precision and more local stores.
Another gift search I tried was for iPod speakers for your bicycle. TheFind.com immediately came up with suggestions. I also looked to see whether there was a Penn State University blazer, as my husband attended the school. Sure enough, the Web site found one on the first page of search results, although it wasn’t the top item. Note: no Stanford blazer was to be found, but instead it showed a red dress shirt. TheFind.com found most items faster than a traditional search engine. Occasionally the site lost its formatting and had to be reloaded.
TheFind also offers TheFindGreen.com, which searches for organic brands and fair trade items. When I searched, vegetarian shoes, meditation chairs and recycled handbags were hot items. TheFindBuzz.com searches blogs and tells you which celebrities and designers are hot. Britney Spears and Chanel are favorites. Glimpse.com is owned by TheFind and searches for the latest fashions.
TheFind provides a form on its site that enables merchants to submit their Web site address. TheFind offers a partner program so that webmasters and bloggers can recommend products using widgets and links.
TheFind gets revenue from advertising, sponsored links and sales commissions. The company expects to break even in the next few months, having received $15 million in C-round funding in July 2007. Investors are Redpoint Ventures, Bain Capital Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company has approximately 30 employees, all in Mountain View.
Searching on this company’s Web sites gives me plenty of choices for Christmas presents, but I’d like to see TheFind expand globally and make international gift shopping easier.
Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.
