Zaarly Storefronts arrive in Kansas City this weekend
The first thing you need to know about Zaarly’s newest endeavor, Zaarly Storefronts, is that you can leave the trowel at home. These are not brick-and-mortar businesses, despite the name. Rather, Zaarly is changing its core focus from a model of customers’ posting their desires and having Zaarly users fulfill them to one where sellers market their services and products to buyers through a virtual
store. On Saturday, Kansas City will be the fourth market to launch Storefronts.
Zaarly CEO Bo Fishback, who continues to live in Kansas City even though his company’s headquarters moved to San Francisco earlier this year, says the pivot toward giving sellers online spaces of their own came after studying Zaarly’s sales data. But it was also partially inspired by a photo book of New York City storefronts that had gone vacant after longstanding businesses had failed.
“Some [of the businesses] were like third-generation Italian meat markets,” he says. “A health inspector came and told them they were no longer able to hang meat in their windows. They took the meat down, and all their customers started going away.”
