Small business takeaway:
- As consumers demand made-for-me experiences, three startups tap different routes to personalization that pay dividends. Luxury resale platform Fashionphile uses real people — concierges and in-store touchpoints — to reduce risk on high-ticket buys, deepen customer trust, and drive sales. Food brand Ithaca Hummus turns fans into collaborators, using playful marketing, rewards, and customer feedback to inform flavors. Live-shopping platform Whatnot makes personalization happen on camera, where sellers respond in real time and communities drive discovery and purchases.
Today’s consumers demand much more from the companies they buy from than a one-size-fits-all shopping experience. Instead, as they shop across categories from clothing to collectibles to food and drink and decide which brands deserve their loyalty, they increasingly expect customization and personalization.
Customers want businesses to seamlessly meet their individual needs, address their evolving concerns, and make them feel like part of a like-minded community. But effective personalization takes more than simply plugging data into an algorithm.
Doing it well requires brands to truly understand their customers, earn their trust, and respond in real time while consistently delivering an excellent product. Luxury resale business Fashionphile, live shopping platform Whatnot, and food brand Ithaca Hummus share with CO— how the brands have built and retained a loyal customer base through personalization.
Fashionphile leans on human connection, not just technology, to deliver high-touch personalization in luxury resale
As one of the world’s top resellers of pre-owned luxury goods from brands like Chanel, Hermès, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and the exclusive re-commerce partner of Neiman Marcus, Fashionphile caters to customers who know exactly what they like.
Since Sarah Davis founded the company in 1999, she’s transformed it from a solely digital business into a fully integrated omnichannel luxury brand that provides a cohesive experience for customers online as well as in its 14 physical locations. A driving force of Fashionphile’s personalization efforts is its client concierge service, which gives customers complimentary personalized shopping assistance.
Davis is taking a page out of the book of the luxury brands she sells in developing her approach to personalization and bespoke customer service. Brands like Louis Vuitton and Valentino are making large investments in clienteling and relationship-building to help them differentiate in the market and to hold onto top clients.
“We really want to be the best brand doing what we’re doing,” said Davis. “We want to give our shoppers and sellers a brand they can trust and lean into and be as excited to support as the brands they love and buy from us. We have an entire team that supports online customers and builds relationships just like luxury brands do.”
Fashionphile intentionally built its team of personal shoppers to be at customers’ “beck and call” and guide them to items that appeal to them, help to review product conditions, and advise on purchases. Style experts work one-on-one with customers to find the best bag for a wedding or a gala or to use for everyday wear.
Customers say that talking with a Fashionphile concierge team member is like getting the whole store to yourself, said Davis, the company’s founder and CEO.
“It’s about real relationships with people,” Davis told CO—. “We’ve found that the more investments we’re making not using AI, but having human interaction, more human involvement, that’s been a way we’re differentiating ourselves. A business existing solely online is going to be easier to kill. So, we want to do even more human interaction and human involvement.”
It’s an approach that’s paid off for Fashionphile: The multimillion-dollar brand has surpassed 1.5 million registered customers and continues to grow steadily, building out new investments, including resale platform Luxe Collective in the U.K.
[Read more: How Fashionphile Founder Grew Her Humble eBay Shop Into a Multimillion-Dollar Resale Juggernaut]
Ithaca Hummus taps community and customer feedback to personalize its products and brand
Ithaca Hummus has built a brand that feels personal with its authentic marketing campaigns and efforts to connect hummus lovers with one another.
The food brand’s marketing initiatives attract customers by exploring key concepts that go beyond hummus. For instance, the brand’s “Tastes Outside Your Comfort Zone” campaign encourages culinary adventure, challenging customers to experiment and find flavors that suit them best.
“It’s not necessarily about hummus, it’s more about the ethos of ‘I’m not afraid to try new stuff,’” said Ithaca Hummus Founder Chris Kirby. “We want to celebrate people who try new things,” he said. “And we want to be the new thing that you try,” and then keep returning to.
A few years ago, the brand quietly kicked off another marketing effort: the Tub Club. Ithaca Hummus worked with retail marketing platform Aisle to print codes inside the bottom of each hummus tub. Customers who find the hidden code scan it, and once enrolled in the club, the brand will Venmo the customer the full price of one tub if they buy two. Customers who tell friends about the club get free Ithaca Hummus products.
“If you can get someone to tell two friends, and then they tell two friends, it has this spider web of a network effect,” said Kirby. “It’s a way to accelerate word of mouth and reward our fans. We never did a lot of pushing with it. I think it will just build, and we’re OK with letting that happen.”
'It’s about real relationships with people,' Davis told CO—. 'We’ve found that the more investments we’re making not using AI, but having human interaction, more human involvement, that’s been a way we’re differentiating ourselves.
The effort helps foster a community of hummus lovers, creating spaces where customers feel seen, heard, and part of the product itself. Customer input informs everything from new brand flavors to packaging, effectively turning feedback into a form of personalization.
Over a decade after its founding, Ithaca Hummus’ cult following of hummus lovers last year alone bought 10 million tubs of unexpected flavors like lemon beet and lemon dill. The brand, which launched in 2013, is sold at more than 10,000 retail stores, and lifetime revenue has surpassed $150 million, without Kirby ever raising a formal fundraising round.
Whatnot: Real-time interaction and community engagement redefines what personalization looks like in e-commerce
Shopping platform Whatnot has carved out a niche in the burgeoning world of businesses, selling its products online during live videos by focusing its efforts on collectibles, vintage items, and one-of-a-kind finds.
The platform reflects the e-commerce evolution of home shopping networks, which were popular for decades via TV merchants like QVC and HSN.
Whatnot personalizes the shopping experience for its customers not through algorithms alone, but with live interaction. Sellers of items from Pokémon cards to comic books and sneakers respond to buyers in real time, communities shape what’s shown, and relationships, rather than only data, drive shoppers’ discovery. It’s the feeling of being at a collectors’ convention or a comic shop while shopping efficiently and securely online.
“This community-first approach is really why Whatnot has been able to find the success we have,” said Armand Wilson, Vice President of Categories & Expansion at Whatnot.
Buyers often come away from livestreaming sessions feeling like they know the sellers personally. Features like referral incentives and a tiered rewards club, ranging from “Bronze” to “Diamond” levels and customizable by sellers, help keep users engaged, encouraging them to return frequently, spend more time on the platform, and interact with both sellers and fellow shoppers.
That engagement runs deep: The average buyer spends about 80 minutes a day in the app, tuning into streams focused on their interests and buying roughly a dozen items each week. For sellers, the impact is significant: 38% of those who also run brick-and-mortar stores report their live-selling revenue has outpaced in-store sales over the past three months, according to the company.
The strategy has fueled rapid growth. Whatnot began with categories like Funko Pop! collectibles and Pokémon cards, expanded into sports cards, comic books, and sneakers, and now spans hundreds of categories. The platform hosts more than 175,000 hours of livestreams each week, far surpassing the scale of traditional TV shopping.
Meanwhile, early sellers offering sports cards have scaled into some of the largest card sellers in the industry, now selling hundreds of millions in sports cards a year and employing hundreds of people, said Wilson.
Former finance worker Zoreen Kabani of ZKStyles, for example, joined Whatnot full time in 2022, selling clothes from home. She’s earned over $1.3 million on the platform since.
Wilson said Whatnot is doubling down on focusing on its communities and what they want, instead of pairing brands with influencers without a genuine connection to products.
The adoption of livestream shopping is in its early days in the United States, said Wilson, but given how the technology connects buyers and sellers in such a personal way, “I think it’s just a matter of time. I do think this is the year that live shopping becomes more mainstream.”
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