Alibaba selects winning product pitches from U.S. companies
Alibaba Group’s Tmall Global e-commerce platform has chosen nine U.S. small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to participate in Singles Day.
Tmall Global has named the winners of its first-ever Go Global 11.11 Pitch Fest, an initiative designed to help U.S. SMBs expand their businesses globally. The nine winning brands were selected from nearly 100 applications in two weeks.
Winners are slated to participate in Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. The festival, popularly known as “Singles Day,” is based on a holiday created by Chinese college students in the 1990s and was introduced as an online sales event by Alibaba in 2009. The 2019 edition broke records with an estimated $38.4 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV).
The nine winners represent retail verticals including beauty, food, wellness, personal care, home, and baby. In the beauty space, winners include C.O. Bigelow, the oldest apothecary in America founded in 1838, which creates customized formulas and therapeutic preparations; Lab to Beauty, a clean beauty company inspired by the farm-to-table movement; and Volition Beauty, which uses crowdsourcing to invent and produce beauty products.
Winners in the food and beverage space include Harmony Proteins, provider of functional collagen waters and nutritious superfood oats; and Shivelight Premium Beverage Company, a Montana-based company that provides natural drinking vinegars. In the wellness and personal care categories, winners include Pipette, a clean personal care brand focused on families; haircare brand Punky Colour; and Uncle Bud’s, which offers pain relief hemp and CBD products. Additional winner is home goods brand French Bull, provider of a tableware line and full lifestyle collection.
The winning brands will be fast-tracked and launched on Tmall Global through its Overseas Fulfillment program, which is designed to offer greater inventory flexibility and reduced operational and logistics costs, in time for Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival this year.
In the coming weeks, Tmall Global will work with these businesses to onboard their products and provide them with marketing tools and resources to help them drive brand awareness. These brands will also continue to receive advice from the advisors and Tmall Global as they explore the China market and formulate their business strategies. Since April 2020, Tmall Global says it has launched more than 150 U.S. brands.
“The Go Global 11.11 Pitch Fest is designed to spotlight and celebrate top U.S. small and medium-sized brands that have enormous potential to grow their businesses globally,” said Tony Shan, head of Tmall Global for the Americas. “The Pitch Fest is just the beginning. We look forward to working with these brands and bringing their unique and high-quality products to Chinese consumers in the upcoming 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.”