The New York platform that turned word-of-mouth into a measurable retail channel - and built the cash register for the creator economy.
Somewhere right now, a beauty creator screenshots a serum she actually uses, drops it into her storefront, and posts the link. A follower taps, buys, and the creator earns a cut before the package ships. The brand behind the serum watches the sale land in a dashboard - name attached, ROI attached. No agency call. No guesswork. That quiet loop, repeated a few hundred thousand times a day, is ShopMy.
For a decade, the creator economy ran on vibes. Influence was real but slippery - everyone agreed recommendations moved product, and almost no one could prove it cleanly. ShopMy's bet was unfashionably simple: make the recommendation itself the transaction, and measure everything around it.
Influence was always real. ShopMy just gave it a receipt.
Here is the inconvenient truth the industry lived with: shoppers trusted a stranger with good taste more than a polished ad, yet the tools for turning that trust into income were clunky, the commissions thin, and the brand relationships built on email chains and free product mailed into the void.
Creators stitched together link shorteners, spreadsheets, and DMs. Brands shipped gifts and hoped. The data, when it existed at all, arrived late and lied a little. The incumbent, LTK, had owned this corner since 2011 - which, in software years, is roughly an eternity, and like most eternities, comfortable.
The deeper friction was trust running in two directions at once. Shoppers trusted creators but had no clean way to act on a recommendation without leaving the post, hunting the product, and abandoning the cart halfway. Brands, meanwhile, distrusted the whole arrangement on principle - they were spending real budget on relationships they couldn't see, attribute, or repeat. Both sides wanted the same thing and neither had the instrument to get it.
A market where everyone agrees on the value and no one agrees on the math is not a market. It's a waiting room.
The opening was not "invent influence." It was "make influence countable, well-paid, and pleasant to operate." Boring on a slide. Enormous in practice.
ShopMy's origin is almost suspiciously on-brand. Tiffany Lopinsky started an Instagram called Boston Foodies as a Harvard sophomore in 2014; it took off, and she learned firsthand how influence outpaced the tools to capture it. Harry Rein was an engineer at a startup called Popcart. Chris Tinsley was at MIT Sloan, building a shoppable-storefront prototype on the side with Rein.
When Lopinsky joined Popcart in 2018 and saw the prototype, she recognized what it was - and, with the eye of someone who had actually been the user, what it wasn't yet. She reskinned the original turquoise-and-pink interface into stark black-and-white. Her description of the first design has become a small company legend: "like, what a man thought a woman would want."
Like, what a man thought a woman would want.
The three launched the first version in July 2020 - a moment when the world was, conveniently, stuck indoors and shopping from screens. Rein took CEO, Lopinsky President, Tinsley the technology. The bet underneath: taste is a durable asset, and the person who builds the rails for taste-driven commerce gets paid every time taste pays off.
What's easy to miss is how the founding team mapped onto the problem. Lopinsky had been the creator, so she knew exactly where the existing tools insulted the people meant to use them. Rein and Tinsley could build. The combination meant ShopMy didn't have to guess what creators wanted, then build it, then discover it was wrong. It built for a user already sitting in the room - and then, importantly, listened to her about the parts a man thought a woman would want.
Strip away the funding headlines and ShopMy is a tidy three-sided machine. Creators get a beautiful, shoppable storefront and tools to monetize what they already do. Brands get distribution they can actually measure. Shoppers get recommendations from a human they chose to follow. The product is the glue between all three.
A curated, shoppable shop where creators link products and earn 10-30% commissions on the sales they drive.
A browser clipper that turns any product on any website into a ShopMy link in seconds.
Automated gifting catalogs brands send creators to self-select products, wired into Shopify.
Direct chat, paid partnerships, codes, and campaign tooling between brands and creators.
50% of gifting Lookbooks get accepted within 45 minutes of sending. Free product, it turns out, is a fast yes.
The Lookbook is the sleeper hit. Roughly 70% of ShopMy's brand partners use it, because it solves the oldest, dumbest problem in influencer marketing: brands mailing things to people who never wanted them. Here, the creator picks. The brand ships into demand instead of into hope.
The genius of the design is that each tool feeds the others. SnapShop fills storefronts. Storefronts generate sales data. Sales data tells brands which creators actually move product, which makes Collaborations smarter and Lookbooks better targeted. Every action a creator takes for their own benefit also makes the network more legible to brands - and a more legible network is exactly what brands pay for. The product isn't a feature list; it's a loop that gets tighter the more people use it.
Skeptics of the creator economy have a fair point: it's a category littered with big rounds and small revenue. ShopMy's defense is unusually concrete. Hundreds of thousands of creators. Over 1,600 brand partners with tens of thousands more merchants in the affiliate catalog. And roughly a billion dollars in annual sales flowing across the rails.
The cap table reads like a guest list: Bessemer, Bain Capital Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Avenir on the institutional side; Sofia Richie, Aimee Song, Gregg Renfrew, and Raissa Gerona among the operators and tastemakers who put their own money where their feeds are. When the people who built the creator economy invest in the infrastructure for it, that's its own kind of due diligence.
Profitable in 2024, then a $70M round in 2025. They earned the right to raise before they raised the round.
ShopMy's framing has hardened over time into something close to a worldview. The company calls itself "curated commerce infrastructure" - the plumbing where premium brands, culture-driving curators, and taste-conscious shoppers meet to build durable businesses on human recommendation rather than algorithmic churn.
It's a pointed position. The rest of the internet spent the decade optimizing feeds to guess what you want. ShopMy's argument is that a person you trust still beats a model that profiles you - and that the economy should pay that person properly. Romantic? A little. But it's a romance with a commission structure, which tends to last longer.
There's a quieter strategic claim underneath the worldview, too. By framing itself as infrastructure rather than another app competing for attention, ShopMy sidesteps the trap that catches most creator-economy companies: dependence on a single platform's whims. Storefronts work alongside Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube rather than against them. The recommendation can originate anywhere; the transaction still runs through ShopMy. In a world where one algorithm change can erase a creator's livelihood overnight, being the layer that doesn't move is a surprisingly defensible place to stand.
The feed guesses what you want. A tastemaker knows. ShopMy is a bet that knowing still wins.
The competitive fight is real - LTK isn't going anywhere, and every platform from TikTok to Amazon wants a slice of social shopping. But ShopMy has done the hard, unglamorous thing: it built rails that creators and brands both actually want to stand on, and it made money doing it. In a category famous for torching cash, that's the rare moat.
Go back to where we started. The creator screenshots the serum, drops the link, posts it. A follower buys. Five years ago, that recommendation would have evaporated into a feed - trusted, effective, and unpaid. Today it routes through ShopMy: the creator gets her cut, the brand gets its receipt, and the shopper gets something a tastemaker actually uses. The loop closed. That's the whole company - and increasingly, a billion dollars a year says it's the whole point.
Taste was always valuable. ShopMy just made it bankable.