Searching for the perfect gift? A New Orleans startup helps local stores score online sales.

BY RICH COLLINS | Staff writer
Dec 12, 2024

To make a reservation at a fancy restaurant, you don’t jog through the French Quarter to see who’s got an available spot. You use OpenTable or Resy.

The same goes for booking a ride, buying a movie ticket or shopping for a used car. There’s a website or mobile app for that.

Back in 2013, though, there wasn't an online option to help shoppers see exactly what was in stock at local stores. That was the problem that New Orleans business partners Mike Massey, Blake Haney, and Ben Hirsch set out to solve that year when they founded the tech startup Locally.

A decade later, the company has quietly grown into a 53-person, fully remote operation that works behind the scenes with roughly 1,000 brands, from Trek bikes to Crocs shoes to Taylor guitars, to help 60 million shoppers research and make purchases each month.

According to Massey, online searches for in-store purchases by Locally have led to about $100 million in direct sales and $2 billion in indirect sales so far in 2024. The company has just started working with Google on a project to help independent retailers compete with big chains when customers search for products in stores near them.

Locally works mostly behind the scenes for now, adding shopping tools to brand websites and collecting inventory data from 40,000 retail stores, as it occupies a space in the startup world that's become common for Louisiana companies: providing an important service to make other businesses more efficient. Like iSeatz, which helps companies sell travel extras, and Chapter Spot, which created member management software for frats and sororities, Locally is another startup that's finding success without becoming a household name.

“We love these kinds of entrepreneurs because they don’t make a lot of noise or ask for much, but they just create companies, jobs, and wealth,” said Josh Fleig, chief innovation officer at Louisiana Economic Development. “We need more of them.”

The Amazon puzzle

Massey was inspired to launch Locally after spending years exploring how technology could help boost sales for his family business, Massey’s Outfitters.

The sporting goods store, which specializes in high-end outdoor merchandise from Patagonia, Cotopaxi, North Face, and other brands — opened in 1972 on Severn Avenue in Metairie. Today, Massey’s flagship store is on Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City, and there are locations on the Northshore and in Baton Rouge.

In 2003, Massey’s had just signed up to be one of the first sporting goods retailers to sell merchandise on Amazon. A few years earlier, the Seattle startup had launched Amazon Marketplace, which opened its platform to other retailers who could access Amazon’s customers for a price.

Massey’s started by listing one of its most popular products on the site, and the results were encouraging.

“The very first day that we're on Amazon, we put up all of the Ugg boots we had,” Massey said. “At that time, Ugg was very trendy. Hundreds of pairs went out the door instantly. We thought, 'This is the greatest platform that has ever existed.'”

Flash forward to 2013 and Massey’s thoughts about being in business with Amazon had evolved considerably.

The cost of commissions, discounts, shipping, advertising, sponsorships, and returns no longer justified the sales volume, he decided. Worse, the experience did nothing to help Massey’s create relationships with customers.

“I could have sold all these Ugg boots in my own store at full price,” Massey said. “Why did I sell them all to Amazon customers for a discount, eat all the shipping costs, and then not have any shoes for my local shoppers?”

Invisible no more

Massey said he realized what independent retailers really needed was for the internet to make them more visible, not the opposite.

That’s when he, Hirsch, and Haney — founder of the Dirty Coast brand — set out to launch a company that could show local store inventory to shoppers who increasingly researched purchases online.

“We had all these products in our store, but when people were doing product research, they couldn’t see that we had exactly what they were looking for, whether it was a Big Green Egg charcoal grill, a new kayak or speakers for the house,” Massey said.

The first step was finding out what stores had in stock, which was easier said than done.

Over the years, a lot of coding time has been spent figuring out how to capture inventory data from retailers, who keep track of their stock in many different ways, from Excel spreadsheets and Google docs to sophisticated online software. One kayak retailer just emails the Locally team a spreadsheet with inventory data every day.

“We make it work,” Massey said. “At the beginning, we were doing anything we could to get the next retailer on.”

In the beginning, Locally was focused on “winning” searches in Google by collecting real-time inventory data from stores and using it to power Locally.com, a website designed to show up high on results pages.

Soon the company expanded its focus beyond its own site to brand websites, which it discovered were getting plenty of traffic from people looking for specific products, sizes, and colors.

Now, for these brand partners, Locally builds store locators, product locators, and ways to promote paths to a purchase. It’s all designed to give consumers real-time data about what products can be found and where — and it includes multiple ways to buy.

“Stores can literally get transactions just by text message,” Massey said. “We're a cart that just follows you around online.”

Massey said all this is important because if customers can get information about what's in stock, they're much more likely to visit a store.

“We are really good at getting people's inventory in front of shoppers. Then we give choices: Do you want to go there and pay? Do you want to buy it now? Do you want to reserve it? Do you want to have Uber deliver it? We do all those things.”

Massey said the long-term goal is to launch a web and mobile app that will do for brick-and-mortar shopping what OpenTable does for restaurant reservations.

Physical retail going strong

This year, Locally began participating in a Google pilot program that provides a path to feature local inventory from independent stores in search results alongside data from big retailers and brands.

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Email Rich Collins at rich.collins@theadvocate.com