Fourpost
Turnkey physical retail spaces for emerging brands.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
$5.0m | Seed | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Fourpost was a retail concept designed to lower the barriers for digitally native and emerging brands to establish a physical presence. Founded in 2018 by Mark Ghermezian, the company operated on a "retail-as-a-service" model, providing brands with fully-equipped, modular "Studio Shops" within larger, high-traffic retail locations like shopping malls. The business model was subscription-based, offering short-term leases of six to twelve months, which provided a cost-effective alternative to traditional long-term retail commitments.
Mark Ghermezian, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded the customer engagement platform Braze (formerly Appboy), identified an opportunity to apply a SaaS-like model to the physical retail industry. His vision was to create a community-driven platform that would simplify the process for brands to open a brick-and-mortar store, handling logistics such as fixtures, signage, lighting, Wi-Fi, and POS hardware. This allowed brands to set up a physical shop in as little as 24 hours. Fourpost also provided a SaaS dashboard with analytics and business management tools to help brands track performance.
The company launched in November 2018 with locations in the Mall of America in Minnesota and the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, two of North America's largest malls, after securing $5 million in seed funding. The funding round included investors such as Blumberg Capital, Susa Ventures, and Collaborative Fund. However, the company's journey was short-lived. The West Edmonton Mall location, which had started under the name RAAS, closed at the end of 2018. In early 2020, Fourpost ceased all operations. The closure coincided with Ghermezian's transition to a new role as Co-CEO of American Dream, a major retail and entertainment complex also developed by the Ghermezian family's company, Triple Five Group. The Fourpost team joined Ghermezian in his new venture.
Keywords: retail as a service, RaaS, physical retail platform, emerging brands, digitally native brands, pop-up retail, short-term lease, retail innovation, mall retail, brand incubator, turnkey retail, studio shops, Mark Ghermezian, Mall of America, retail-tech, brick and mortar, D2C brands, retail experience, flexible retail, community shopping