John Garner, founder of WeShop, joins Gemma Allen of theCUBE at the New York Stock Exchange for a discussion about WeShop's unique business model and its recent launch in the United States. The conversation is part of the "theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts" series, providing insights into the evolving landscape of social commerce and community ownership.
In this video, Garner shares their decade-long journey in transforming WeShop from an idea into an influential platform where everyday shoppers become shareholders. Highlighted by Allen and theCUBE Research, the discussion delves into how WeShop integrates social media dynamics with retail, creating a community-driven model that rewards users with company shares. Garner discusses their successful UK pilot and strategic expansion into the U.S. market.
Key takeaways from this episode include Garner's perspective on leveraging community recommendations over traditional advertising, the scalability of WeShop without reliance on logistics and inventory management, and the role of retail partnerships in the platform’s growth. According to Garner, transparency and rewarding customer engagement are central to WeShop's philosophy, creating a more democratized retail experience.
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John Garner, WeShop
In this interview from the theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts series, James White, CTO at CalypsoAI, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack CalypsoAI’s newly launched Security Index – the first comprehensive safety ranking of major generative AI models. White explains how the weekly updated leaderboard and the CASI (CalypsoAI Security Index) score enable apples-to-apples comparisons that blend quality and security, helping enterprises move beyond POC purgatory and toward ROI. The discussion connects model selection and risk posture to enterprise strategy at the intersection of tech and finance – where governance, vendor constraints and performance/latency considerations shape deployment choices at scale.
White details CalypsoAI’s Red-Team product and three attack lenses: signature attacks, operational attacks (e.g., overwhelming outputs that mimic denial-of-service) and “agentic warfare,” which uses autonomous agents to probe for jailbreaks and prompt-injection gaps. He breaks down CASI’s inputs across severity, complexity, decay of older tactics (like DAN variants) and defensive breaking points, alongside an average performance column so teams can weigh capability vs. security. Highlights include Anthropic models leading the safety pack (with Microsoft among the leaders), Claude 3.5 scoring 96.25, Claude 3.7 trending into the #2 slot with different security trade-offs, DeepSeek-R1 landing mid-table and GPT-3.5 Turbo dropping from the top 12. White also previews a human-in-the-loop Purple-Team approach, and shares guidance for continuous testing in CI/CD, model family choices across cloud stacks and real-world implications for POCs, benchmarks and production hardening.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE here at our studio at the New York Stock Exchange, overlooking the offices floor, connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And today we're bringing a little bit of the UK to Wall Street. Joining me in studio, I have John Garner, founder of WeShop. Welcome, John.
John Garner
>> Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> So contrary to what I was told by a one Peter Tuckman, you did not start this company, which essentially makes everyday shoppers shareholders in their purchases, because your wife was a shopping addict.
John Garner
>> No, I think that's an urban myth. I'm happy to go with that.
Gemma Allen
>> A great story though, right? But you did start this because you saw a gap in the market that, as we just said off camera, it's almost like, why didn't I think of that, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah, Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Tell me a little bit about the journey you've been on the last 10 years.
John Garner
>> Yeah. So the journey, it's been a long 10 years and obviously since we debuted on NASDAQ a few weeks ago, everyone thinks it's overnight success. But as we were saying, it's actually quite a long dark night sometimes.
Gemma Allen
>> A lot of whiskey.
John Garner
>> Exactly. So the journey came about from, we were looking at what's going to be next after all these amazing social media companies started. So we looked and thought social commerce, where people can recommend products to each other and talk about them because everyone's been doing that since the beginning of time going, "What's the best bottle of wine? Where should I go on holiday?" So we were looking at it from a recommendation engine. As time went on, especially COVID showed us that suddenly there's a massive rise in retail stockbroking. We all heard the stories about GameStop and everyone's getting involved with it.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, yeah. The meme stocks.
John Garner
>> Exactly. So we thought, wait a minute, can we kind of combine some of these concepts together? And then we looked at some of these amazing companies again and said value has been built by the founders in those businesses, but actually if they didn't have a community and users, then the value wouldn't be there. So the community have built the value alongside the founders and everyone, but they haven't actually really been rewarded for it other than getting a free platform. We've all seen the films on Netflix about if you're not paying for it, you're the product and everything. So we looked at it and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we gave over 50% of the company back to the people for using it?" But for not just using it, but they've got to transact through it. So it's actually revenue. They're doing revenue generating activities for the business. And then they can earn shares in it basically. So we started doing a pilot in 2022 in the UK. We ran $140 million through it. It was fantastic. Great learning experiences. It was a pilot test by definition, tried all kinds of acquisition sources and retention sources. And look, it worked. $140 million is $140 million still. Our big ambition then was come to the US where we've always wanted to come to. And there's three reasons for that. Obviously it's a much bigger online market for retail. There's much higher loyalty market as well. So people want to have loyalty points and loyalty schemes. But the thing that excites us the most is the understanding of the stock market. So if you look at Robin Hood, they've got 25 million users. You look at Schwab, they've got 37 million users. Look at Fidelity, they've got I think 45 million users. So these people understand what stocks and shares are, because by definition, they've got a trading account. And obviously after COVID and well, during COVID, it was so much easier to trade and people can set up their accounts with eToro or Webull or whoever it might be. So we said, "Look, we want to come to America." Which was challenging. So we were working on this listing for two years because we are dealing in securities and we're deemed to be selling securities. So it's a big deal.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, it's interesting cashing it, right? Because it's almost like a fund.
John Garner
>> Yeah, exactly. So it's a really big deal. And we've enjoyed the process because it means it's all been done properly. So we're massively up for transparency across for our users to be able to see it. And obviously the stock market allows us or necessitates that we are totally transparent with everyone and everything's being done properly. So the listing, getting to the point four weeks ago... Four weeks, that went quick.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
John Garner
>> So the actual listing, it's been a hard journey, but one that we've kept fighting for and we worked through it and we got to the point where now we have launched the product in the United States and I hope you'll be signing up after this.
Gemma Allen
>> Oh, really? My husband says they're hallways like an Amazon warehouse, and you're Prime customer.
John Garner
>> Exactly. I think the other thing that we saw in the pilot in the UK is a lot of the retailers that we work with, it's a new model. So giving the reward that is actual ownership. And now in a regulated environment to people, it's interesting.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah. Well, tell me about the model. I'm particularly interested to understand both the technology side of this. Like you said, it was all built in this idea of like recommender systems, which has become a huge growth category for multichannel commerce across the board. And even at that huge transferable impacts too. But also the operational layer because the supply chain side of this, when you talk about the US being such a right market, people are so convenience driven here. It's so speed driven. So I think people make decisions just based on that. The amount of times I think I really should be spending more with small businesses, not with these titans, right? But you think in a very, well, I think I guess in a very fast panicked way sometimes. Tell me about it, about the technology and the operations.
John Garner
>> Yeah, absolutely. So from a recommendation point of view, it's actually, obviously the technology's built and we've got a great team that work on that. But if you think of from the recommendation point of view, people are recommending products to each other every single day of the week. And people are asking for advice every single day of the week. So it's very simple on our platform. You can upload some media. So we could upload a picture of us here at New York Stock Exchange with your laptop and tag the laptop. So we've got hundreds and hundreds of millions of products in our catalog from all the top retailers that you'd imagine. So you can upload your own media, uploading your captions, upload the products which are from the retailers into that post, and then push it into our social feed. And as well share it to all your other social feeds and including things like WhatsApp and iMessage.
So then you can be sharing your product recommendations with your own media, which means you've actually bought it. So there's no bigger recommendation on a product than the fact that you've used your own money to buy it. You're not getting paid to promote it. You're doing it because I actually really like the laptop or I really like the whiskey, or whatever it might be. So the social recommendation side of it is really interesting because what we found in the pilot was friends do actually help each other for nothing. What a concept. Everyone thinks everything's paid, but actually what we saw was, because what you can do in the app as well is ask advice. So we're like, "I'm going out tonight. I don't know what dress to wear, whatever." And people then recommend and they could tag products in the response going, "Oh, why don't you wear this or why don't you use this?"
And so what we saw was actually community still exists in this world rather than paid adverts and people and celebrities are paid to promote products. And I think everyone's worked out that everyone gets paid, whereas otherwise no one's getting paid.
Gemma Allen
>> It's organic.
John Garner
>> So it's a real recommendation. So I think that's really interesting. And then you touched on logistics as well. And so the amazing thing about WeShop is we're not involved in any of the logistics. We're not even involved in the payment. So when you come to WeShop and then click out to go to eBay to buy whatever you're going to buy, you're transacting with eBay. And so the money's going to eBay, eBay are sorting out the logistics of it. If there's a return, they're doing the returns. We don't touch any of that, which means that we're massively scalable.
Gemma Allen
>> So the partnership side of this then must be absolutely huge. Is it like that must be a massive
John Garner
>> Yeah, exactly. So we've got over 500 retailers in the UK. So big ones like John Lewis, like eBay, ASOS, all the ones you'd think of. In the US, we've onboarded retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens, Bloomingdale's, Nike, eBay, and the list goes on, and you can see all the retailers on the app when you download it, which is available in the AppStore and the Google Play Store.
Gemma Allen
>> You're also obviously building a very insightful repository of data too, on how you profile categories for spend, right? And I'm sure even in terms of what the connection points are to who recommends what to whom, right?
John Garner
>> Absolutely. And it's amazing because if you think about it, we've got the social bit because we've got the users and we've got the product bit. So then when you start overlaying those together, it suddenly becomes really interesting. And if you think of where this could go to, say you've just booked a holiday through Expedia and you're going... Where's your favorite destination to go other than Ireland?
Gemma Allen
>> I was about to say Ireland. I guess Turks and Caicos.
John Garner
>> So you've booked someone to go to the Turks and Caicos. Previously you've bought swimwear from Bloomingdale's. So wouldn't it be great if we tell Bloomingdale's that you're going to the Turks and Caicos, and then they can pitch you a great offer on swimwear, because Bloomingdale's who you bought swimming from. I have no idea you're going to the Turks and Caicos. So suddenly if we can share the data, obviously as long as everyone agrees to it. But then if everyone agrees to it, then there's going to be more value because the company can charge more money to the retailers, which means the company hopefully makes more money, which means guess what? How much are your shares?
Gemma Allen
>> Well, let's talk about that, because I think that's very interesting, especially from a European versus American standpoint, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Data and how data's shared, how data's managed, how it's protected. We have two, I guess, big continents on two very different tracks there. So how do you think about that from a user based perspective?
John Garner
>> I think what we've seen from a user based perspective is people are happy to share the data if they're actually getting some value for it, and it's being done in a safe way. So in the UK, people weren't worried about that data as long as they're getting some benefit from it. And again, it goes back to that transparency point. As long as it's transparent and you're getting a better experience, so you're getting your swimwear at a better price because now they know that you're going away. I don't think you'd be upset by that. And as well, if the companies that you are a shareholder of is making more money as a result of that. I don't think you'd be upset, but maybe you tell me.
Gemma Allen
>> I wouldn't. It's democratizing the financial gain opportunity, right?
John Garner
>> Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Which is a lot better than somebody just giving your data away, which we know is happening all the time.
John Garner
>> And I think you use the word democratization there. I think that's overly used sometimes, but what we are doing is we are democratizing some of that retail margin and giving it back to the users in a regulated unit.
Gemma Allen
>> Absolutely.
John Garner
>> Which is fully registered with the SEC. And when those shares come to maturity in 13 months, then we can distribute those to our users as we go.
Gemma Allen
>> So tell me, you said it's been 10 years, you were a 10-year overnight startup, right? Which is again, you only ever see the part where somebody's letting off confetti cannons ringing the bell.
John Garner
>> Bringing the closing value.
Gemma Allen
>> You don't see the cold, dark nights or the, like we talked about earlier, crying into your soup on a Monday morning, et cetera. But tell me, in terms of like when you started this journey, first of all, how did you fund this? What's your own background? What made you decide, okay, I'm going to go all in on this. And you said you bootstrapped. Talk to me what that journey was like.
John Garner
>> That was a fun journey. So my background was I left university, went to the, work in London at an investment company. So it was all small cap, so learnt a lot there. Now I was working with some other partners doing the same kind of stuff. And then this opportunity, we were just talking about social media and e-commerce and where we think it's going. And then, so it originally started, the original idea was called the Social Superstore. No one liked the name. I thought it was a good name.
Gemma Allen
>> It was very self-explanatory, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah. So the Social Superstore was, again, it was all about friend to friend recommendations basically and recommendations. But the problem thing that we learned was, well, how do you actually get the users? Because we weren't giving incentives obviously in shares or anything like that. Basically, if you recommended a product, we'd split some of the affiliate revenue back with the user. And then we launched it. And no one liked the name, no one liked the color scheme, no one understood the concept. They were like, "How can I sell something to my friends that I don't own?" So we went back to the drawing board, we rebranded it as WeShop. And if you think about it, back then, the commercial model wasn't even there because any money we were getting in, we were just splitting with the users. And fast forwarding to where we are now, if you think about it, we get paid by the affiliate networks, by the retailers for driving sales and we get advertising revenue. Now the shares have been put into the trust, so there's no cash cost of acquisition for the users. So all the funds and all the VCs, and all the private equity guys, will always ask about what's the customer acquisition cost versus the lifetime value. When you think about the customer acquisition cost, if you're recommending one of your friends to get more shares, that's a non-cash cost. So if the company's keeping all the cash, and its costs are its staff and the Christmas party, which I'm not even going to go to this year because I'm here, it's really interesting. So if you look at the business model, so at scale, the business model can throw off a lot of money. And then that money and depends on what the board wants to decide, it could pay dividends back to its shareholders, it could do buybacks, it could do lots of different things with that cash. And if you just think about numbers, and this isn't a forecast, just hypothetically, if there's a million people using the app in the US and they're all spending a thousand bucks a month on travel, clothes, beauty products, food, da, da, da, that's a billion dollars a month of GMV. Obviously we're making percentage off that and then our cost is our staff basically. At the moment, we're not interested in doing big Super Bowl ads, which is then taking money out of the business. So we'd rather it be a proper community viral network of people recommending the platform. And one of the things, again, we saw in the UK is people always say it's too good to be true. And we always say, well, it's too good not to share. Where is the risk? This unit that you're getting is costing is a zero cash cost for it.
And I think we touched on before, one of the amazing things we saw in the pilot was I think it was 82% skewed to women who were using the platform. And a lot of those women have children. And one of the things that was really heartwarming and that we really doubled down on is, if you're doing your shopping, these shares, these We points are going to now going to turn into shares after how many years, they could go into for the future for your children and they could pay for college, they could pay for a house deposit, they could pay for whatever it is to give them a chance. And what's it cost them as an investment cost? Nothing. It's just going to the .
Gemma Allen
>> It's so fascinating. We spoke offline about the whole CRM model, right? And the fact that those loyalty schemes, the power and success of those has been incredible. If you think about this as an independent, organic way to bring some money back into . It's really-
John Garner
>> And without spending billions on acquisition effectively.
Gemma Allen
>> It's so smart. Tell me this though, I'm interested in this, the reach, the audience engagement side of this, because at the end of the day, you're bringing lots of brands in as partners, but we all know how algorithms work, how SEO works. You spend big bucks on things like the Super Bowl, perhaps that works these days, who knows anymore, right? The audience side of things is changing so much. How do you think about audience engagement? How do you market this? Yeah.
John Garner
>> So audience engagement, so we believe that that comes through community as well. So we're working with some communities which we'll announce in due course, no doubt, and they've got amazing networks of shoppers within them. So basically we are speaking to them. And we saw this in the UK pilot, we launched something called the Founders Program and we made people that have got little networks effectively founders. And it went really well and we saw the virality and then the conversion rates of when they were bringing people onto the platform were unbelievable compared to what you think as traditional celebrities. So I was going to say we're not in a rush. We're in a rush for the retail revolution as we call it. However, we don't want to run so fast that we trip up. So we want to do everything organically. We need to build the community properly, we need to educate properly, we need to bring more retailers on properly. So we need to do everything properly. So it's built firmly to scale to where we want it to go to. And we talk about scalability as well. The great thing is we're using the affiliate network technology. So we can scale into Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, subject to the securities laws obviously in those countries, and again, we do things properly, but this can scale. Because again, we're not holding inventory, we're not doing payments, we're not doing returns. So we are this portal.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, you're a gateway.
John Garner
>> Exactly right. Exactly right.
Gemma Allen
>> 100%.
John Garner
>> Exactly right.
Gemma Allen
>> So tell me, last minute, interested to know, what's ahead. Are there new markets you're planning to break into in the next year? You just had a very exciting month. I hope you're going to go home and pop some champagne over Christmas. Have a glass for me, but tell me, what are you planning?
John Garner
>> Yeah. So we see growth coming from different areas, growth from users. So obviously the more people that hear about it in America and it's an amazing country, lots of people. But also, so we can go international again, subject to securities, laws, technologies built to scale into different jurisdictions. Also, we want to look at stuff like you have to buy insurance whether you like it or not. So we want to look at other products so we could white label insurance. WeInsure. We could do a mobile network. Because again, if we've got the users because they're part of the community, why wouldn't you buy products from your own business that you're a shareholder of?
Gemma Allen
>> It's a brokerage, right? That's exactly what insurance has always been. It's buying-
John Garner
>> Exactly. Someone asked me earlier, they said, "Where do you want this to be?" And said, "We want it to be the biggest shopping platform in the world, majority owned by the people that created it."
Gemma Allen
>> Love it. Well, listen, I'm going to check it out for sure anyway, John.
John Garner
>> Excellent. Thank you very much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
John Garner
>> Brilliant. Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen, here at our studio at the New York Stock Exchange, connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Thanks so much for watching.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE here at our studio at the New York Stock Exchange, overlooking the offices floor, connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And today we're bringing a little bit of the UK to Wall Street. Joining me in studio, I have John Garner, founder of WeShop. Welcome, John.
John Garner
>> Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> So contrary to what I was told by a one Peter Tuckman, you did not start this company, which essentially makes everyday shoppers shareholders in their purchases, because your wife was a shopping addict.
John Garner
>> No, I think that's an urban myth. I'm happy to go with that.
Gemma Allen
>> A great story though, right? But you did start this because you saw a gap in the market that, as we just said off camera, it's almost like, why didn't I think of that, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah, Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Tell me a little bit about the journey you've been on the last 10 years.
John Garner
>> Yeah. So the journey, it's been a long 10 years and obviously since we debuted on NASDAQ a few weeks ago, everyone thinks it's overnight success. But as we were saying, it's actually quite a long dark night sometimes.
Gemma Allen
>> A lot of whiskey.
John Garner
>> Exactly. So the journey came about from, we were looking at what's going to be next after all these amazing social media companies started. So we looked and thought social commerce, where people can recommend products to each other and talk about them because everyone's been doing that since the beginning of time going, "What's the best bottle of wine? Where should I go on holiday?" So we were looking at it from a recommendation engine. As time went on, especially COVID showed us that suddenly there's a massive rise in retail stockbroking. We all heard the stories about GameStop and everyone's getting involved with it.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, yeah. The meme stocks.
John Garner
>> Exactly. So we thought, wait a minute, can we kind of combine some of these concepts together? And then we looked at some of these amazing companies again and said value has been built by the founders in those businesses, but actually if they didn't have a community and users, then the value wouldn't be there. So the community have built the value alongside the founders and everyone, but they haven't actually really been rewarded for it other than getting a free platform. We've all seen the films on Netflix about if you're not paying for it, you're the product and everything. So we looked at it and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we gave over 50% of the company back to the people for using it?" But for not just using it, but they've got to transact through it. So it's actually revenue. They're doing revenue generating activities for the business. And then they can earn shares in it basically. So we started doing a pilot in 2022 in the UK. We ran $140 million through it. It was fantastic. Great learning experiences. It was a pilot test by definition, tried all kinds of acquisition sources and retention sources. And look, it worked. $140 million is $140 million still. Our big ambition then was come to the US where we've always wanted to come to. And there's three reasons for that. Obviously it's a much bigger online market for retail. There's much higher loyalty market as well. So people want to have loyalty points and loyalty schemes. But the thing that excites us the most is the understanding of the stock market. So if you look at Robin Hood, they've got 25 million users. You look at Schwab, they've got 37 million users. Look at Fidelity, they've got I think 45 million users. So these people understand what stocks and shares are, because by definition, they've got a trading account. And obviously after COVID and well, during COVID, it was so much easier to trade and people can set up their accounts with eToro or Webull or whoever it might be. So we said, "Look, we want to come to America." Which was challenging. So we were working on this listing for two years because we are dealing in securities and we're deemed to be selling securities. So it's a big deal.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, it's interesting cashing it, right? Because it's almost like a fund.
John Garner
>> Yeah, exactly. So it's a really big deal. And we've enjoyed the process because it means it's all been done properly. So we're massively up for transparency across for our users to be able to see it. And obviously the stock market allows us or necessitates that we are totally transparent with everyone and everything's being done properly. So the listing, getting to the point four weeks ago... Four weeks, that went quick.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
John Garner
>> So the actual listing, it's been a hard journey, but one that we've kept fighting for and we worked through it and we got to the point where now we have launched the product in the United States and I hope you'll be signing up after this.
Gemma Allen
>> Oh, really? My husband says they're hallways like an Amazon warehouse, and you're Prime customer.
John Garner
>> Exactly. I think the other thing that we saw in the pilot in the UK is a lot of the retailers that we work with, it's a new model. So giving the reward that is actual ownership. And now in a regulated environment to people, it's interesting.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah. Well, tell me about the model. I'm particularly interested to understand both the technology side of this. Like you said, it was all built in this idea of like recommender systems, which has become a huge growth category for multichannel commerce across the board. And even at that huge transferable impacts too. But also the operational layer because the supply chain side of this, when you talk about the US being such a right market, people are so convenience driven here. It's so speed driven. So I think people make decisions just based on that. The amount of times I think I really should be spending more with small businesses, not with these titans, right? But you think in a very, well, I think I guess in a very fast panicked way sometimes. Tell me about it, about the technology and the operations.
John Garner
>> Yeah, absolutely. So from a recommendation point of view, it's actually, obviously the technology's built and we've got a great team that work on that. But if you think of from the recommendation point of view, people are recommending products to each other every single day of the week. And people are asking for advice every single day of the week. So it's very simple on our platform. You can upload some media. So we could upload a picture of us here at New York Stock Exchange with your laptop and tag the laptop. So we've got hundreds and hundreds of millions of products in our catalog from all the top retailers that you'd imagine. So you can upload your own media, uploading your captions, upload the products which are from the retailers into that post, and then push it into our social feed. And as well share it to all your other social feeds and including things like WhatsApp and iMessage.
So then you can be sharing your product recommendations with your own media, which means you've actually bought it. So there's no bigger recommendation on a product than the fact that you've used your own money to buy it. You're not getting paid to promote it. You're doing it because I actually really like the laptop or I really like the whiskey, or whatever it might be. So the social recommendation side of it is really interesting because what we found in the pilot was friends do actually help each other for nothing. What a concept. Everyone thinks everything's paid, but actually what we saw was, because what you can do in the app as well is ask advice. So we're like, "I'm going out tonight. I don't know what dress to wear, whatever." And people then recommend and they could tag products in the response going, "Oh, why don't you wear this or why don't you use this?"
And so what we saw was actually community still exists in this world rather than paid adverts and people and celebrities are paid to promote products. And I think everyone's worked out that everyone gets paid, whereas otherwise no one's getting paid.
Gemma Allen
>> It's organic.
John Garner
>> So it's a real recommendation. So I think that's really interesting. And then you touched on logistics as well. And so the amazing thing about WeShop is we're not involved in any of the logistics. We're not even involved in the payment. So when you come to WeShop and then click out to go to eBay to buy whatever you're going to buy, you're transacting with eBay. And so the money's going to eBay, eBay are sorting out the logistics of it. If there's a return, they're doing the returns. We don't touch any of that, which means that we're massively scalable.
Gemma Allen
>> So the partnership side of this then must be absolutely huge. Is it like that must be a massive
John Garner
>> Yeah, exactly. So we've got over 500 retailers in the UK. So big ones like John Lewis, like eBay, ASOS, all the ones you'd think of. In the US, we've onboarded retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens, Bloomingdale's, Nike, eBay, and the list goes on, and you can see all the retailers on the app when you download it, which is available in the AppStore and the Google Play Store.
Gemma Allen
>> You're also obviously building a very insightful repository of data too, on how you profile categories for spend, right? And I'm sure even in terms of what the connection points are to who recommends what to whom, right?
John Garner
>> Absolutely. And it's amazing because if you think about it, we've got the social bit because we've got the users and we've got the product bit. So then when you start overlaying those together, it suddenly becomes really interesting. And if you think of where this could go to, say you've just booked a holiday through Expedia and you're going... Where's your favorite destination to go other than Ireland?
Gemma Allen
>> I was about to say Ireland. I guess Turks and Caicos.
John Garner
>> So you've booked someone to go to the Turks and Caicos. Previously you've bought swimwear from Bloomingdale's. So wouldn't it be great if we tell Bloomingdale's that you're going to the Turks and Caicos, and then they can pitch you a great offer on swimwear, because Bloomingdale's who you bought swimming from. I have no idea you're going to the Turks and Caicos. So suddenly if we can share the data, obviously as long as everyone agrees to it. But then if everyone agrees to it, then there's going to be more value because the company can charge more money to the retailers, which means the company hopefully makes more money, which means guess what? How much are your shares?
Gemma Allen
>> Well, let's talk about that, because I think that's very interesting, especially from a European versus American standpoint, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Data and how data's shared, how data's managed, how it's protected. We have two, I guess, big continents on two very different tracks there. So how do you think about that from a user based perspective?
John Garner
>> I think what we've seen from a user based perspective is people are happy to share the data if they're actually getting some value for it, and it's being done in a safe way. So in the UK, people weren't worried about that data as long as they're getting some benefit from it. And again, it goes back to that transparency point. As long as it's transparent and you're getting a better experience, so you're getting your swimwear at a better price because now they know that you're going away. I don't think you'd be upset by that. And as well, if the companies that you are a shareholder of is making more money as a result of that. I don't think you'd be upset, but maybe you tell me.
Gemma Allen
>> I wouldn't. It's democratizing the financial gain opportunity, right?
John Garner
>> Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Which is a lot better than somebody just giving your data away, which we know is happening all the time.
John Garner
>> And I think you use the word democratization there. I think that's overly used sometimes, but what we are doing is we are democratizing some of that retail margin and giving it back to the users in a regulated unit.
Gemma Allen
>> Absolutely.
John Garner
>> Which is fully registered with the SEC. And when those shares come to maturity in 13 months, then we can distribute those to our users as we go.
Gemma Allen
>> So tell me, you said it's been 10 years, you were a 10-year overnight startup, right? Which is again, you only ever see the part where somebody's letting off confetti cannons ringing the bell.
John Garner
>> Bringing the closing value.
Gemma Allen
>> You don't see the cold, dark nights or the, like we talked about earlier, crying into your soup on a Monday morning, et cetera. But tell me, in terms of like when you started this journey, first of all, how did you fund this? What's your own background? What made you decide, okay, I'm going to go all in on this. And you said you bootstrapped. Talk to me what that journey was like.
John Garner
>> That was a fun journey. So my background was I left university, went to the, work in London at an investment company. So it was all small cap, so learnt a lot there. Now I was working with some other partners doing the same kind of stuff. And then this opportunity, we were just talking about social media and e-commerce and where we think it's going. And then, so it originally started, the original idea was called the Social Superstore. No one liked the name. I thought it was a good name.
Gemma Allen
>> It was very self-explanatory, right?
John Garner
>> Yeah. So the Social Superstore was, again, it was all about friend to friend recommendations basically and recommendations. But the problem thing that we learned was, well, how do you actually get the users? Because we weren't giving incentives obviously in shares or anything like that. Basically, if you recommended a product, we'd split some of the affiliate revenue back with the user. And then we launched it. And no one liked the name, no one liked the color scheme, no one understood the concept. They were like, "How can I sell something to my friends that I don't own?" So we went back to the drawing board, we rebranded it as WeShop. And if you think about it, back then, the commercial model wasn't even there because any money we were getting in, we were just splitting with the users. And fast forwarding to where we are now, if you think about it, we get paid by the affiliate networks, by the retailers for driving sales and we get advertising revenue. Now the shares have been put into the trust, so there's no cash cost of acquisition for the users. So all the funds and all the VCs, and all the private equity guys, will always ask about what's the customer acquisition cost versus the lifetime value. When you think about the customer acquisition cost, if you're recommending one of your friends to get more shares, that's a non-cash cost. So if the company's keeping all the cash, and its costs are its staff and the Christmas party, which I'm not even going to go to this year because I'm here, it's really interesting. So if you look at the business model, so at scale, the business model can throw off a lot of money. And then that money and depends on what the board wants to decide, it could pay dividends back to its shareholders, it could do buybacks, it could do lots of different things with that cash. And if you just think about numbers, and this isn't a forecast, just hypothetically, if there's a million people using the app in the US and they're all spending a thousand bucks a month on travel, clothes, beauty products, food, da, da, da, that's a billion dollars a month of GMV. Obviously we're making percentage off that and then our cost is our staff basically. At the moment, we're not interested in doing big Super Bowl ads, which is then taking money out of the business. So we'd rather it be a proper community viral network of people recommending the platform. And one of the things, again, we saw in the UK is people always say it's too good to be true. And we always say, well, it's too good not to share. Where is the risk? This unit that you're getting is costing is a zero cash cost for it.
And I think we touched on before, one of the amazing things we saw in the pilot was I think it was 82% skewed to women who were using the platform. And a lot of those women have children. And one of the things that was really heartwarming and that we really doubled down on is, if you're doing your shopping, these shares, these We points are going to now going to turn into shares after how many years, they could go into for the future for your children and they could pay for college, they could pay for a house deposit, they could pay for whatever it is to give them a chance. And what's it cost them as an investment cost? Nothing. It's just going to the .
Gemma Allen
>> It's so fascinating. We spoke offline about the whole CRM model, right? And the fact that those loyalty schemes, the power and success of those has been incredible. If you think about this as an independent, organic way to bring some money back into . It's really-
John Garner
>> And without spending billions on acquisition effectively.
Gemma Allen
>> It's so smart. Tell me this though, I'm interested in this, the reach, the audience engagement side of this, because at the end of the day, you're bringing lots of brands in as partners, but we all know how algorithms work, how SEO works. You spend big bucks on things like the Super Bowl, perhaps that works these days, who knows anymore, right? The audience side of things is changing so much. How do you think about audience engagement? How do you market this? Yeah.
John Garner
>> So audience engagement, so we believe that that comes through community as well. So we're working with some communities which we'll announce in due course, no doubt, and they've got amazing networks of shoppers within them. So basically we are speaking to them. And we saw this in the UK pilot, we launched something called the Founders Program and we made people that have got little networks effectively founders. And it went really well and we saw the virality and then the conversion rates of when they were bringing people onto the platform were unbelievable compared to what you think as traditional celebrities. So I was going to say we're not in a rush. We're in a rush for the retail revolution as we call it. However, we don't want to run so fast that we trip up. So we want to do everything organically. We need to build the community properly, we need to educate properly, we need to bring more retailers on properly. So we need to do everything properly. So it's built firmly to scale to where we want it to go to. And we talk about scalability as well. The great thing is we're using the affiliate network technology. So we can scale into Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, subject to the securities laws obviously in those countries, and again, we do things properly, but this can scale. Because again, we're not holding inventory, we're not doing payments, we're not doing returns. So we are this portal.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, you're a gateway.
John Garner
>> Exactly right. Exactly right.
Gemma Allen
>> 100%.
John Garner
>> Exactly right.
Gemma Allen
>> So tell me, last minute, interested to know, what's ahead. Are there new markets you're planning to break into in the next year? You just had a very exciting month. I hope you're going to go home and pop some champagne over Christmas. Have a glass for me, but tell me, what are you planning?
John Garner
>> Yeah. So we see growth coming from different areas, growth from users. So obviously the more people that hear about it in America and it's an amazing country, lots of people. But also, so we can go international again, subject to securities, laws, technologies built to scale into different jurisdictions. Also, we want to look at stuff like you have to buy insurance whether you like it or not. So we want to look at other products so we could white label insurance. WeInsure. We could do a mobile network. Because again, if we've got the users because they're part of the community, why wouldn't you buy products from your own business that you're a shareholder of?
Gemma Allen
>> It's a brokerage, right? That's exactly what insurance has always been. It's buying-
John Garner
>> Exactly. Someone asked me earlier, they said, "Where do you want this to be?" And said, "We want it to be the biggest shopping platform in the world, majority owned by the people that created it."
Gemma Allen
>> Love it. Well, listen, I'm going to check it out for sure anyway, John.
John Garner
>> Excellent. Thank you very much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
John Garner
>> Brilliant. Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen, here at our studio at the New York Stock Exchange, connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. Thanks so much for watching.
Gemma Allen