Floating on a Rising Tide of Internet Commerce, Pasadena Web Start-up Celebrates Office Opening

Pasadena Internet startup Sellbrite celebrated the opening of its new office on Green Street Thursday evening after three years in the friendly confines of Pasadena’s Idealab incubator studio. According to founder and CEO Brian Nolan, the company is a “web-based application for retailers that helps them build, manage and grow their multichannel e-commerce spaces.”

As Nolan explained, “If you’re a retailer and you have your own web store or web presence, we help you expand beyond that to where the customers are, places like Amazon Marketplace, EBay, or walmart.com, and tie all those places together, so that you can manage all your inventory and orders, and automate as much of the process as possible, all in one interface.”

As an example, said Nolan, “Let’s say you’re selling t-shirts, and you have your own website where you’re selling t-shirts, and now you want to start selling those same t-shirts on Amazon, to attract those customers. Maybe you don’t know how, or it’s a lot of work to go to Amazon and enter all that data, and go through all of that, and then you have to manage what you’re selling.”

“Inventory syncing” is a big job, says Nolan, because when an online store is selling items on its own website they might not want to duplicate the merchandise on other outlets, what Brian explained as “multi-channels.” Thus, when an order is received on one “channel,” Sellbrite automatically updates any other sales channels a company might be using.

“This is a helping hand that allows you to grow,” said Nolan, “by helping you get your product in front of hundreds of millions of new customers, that might not have found your website.”

While the concept isn’t new, Nolan acknowledges, he sees his company as the “new player in town, and a better, easier and more affordable solution.”

In fact, it was Nolan’s work in a similar Pasadena company that sparked his own cyber-desires to help companies succeed in the jam-packed online e-commerce universe.

As one of Idealab’s success stories, Nolan credits the local incubator program as the perfect space for his company to launch from, grow and flourish. Idealab has previously given flight to such companies as eSolar, CarsDirect, NetZero, PetSmart, and dozens of other successful tech companies.

Nolan pitched the company to Idealab owner Bill Gross early in 2013, he recalled.

“At the time, we were too early for VC money. We had used up our friends and family network but this was really the sweet spot for Idealab,” said Nolan. “They brought us in, gave us financial investment, but also provided a space to work in, and a lot of the operational support that companies like us need, things like HR and Payroll, legal services, and pretty anything else that we needed.”

From that support, SellBrite was able to expand from two employees to 16, and create a growing list of new online retail customers to work with.

One great idea spawns another.

Sellbrite is online at www.sellbrite.com .