Multichannel home furnishings retailer Crate and Barrel has partnered with shopkick Inc. as the latest ally to deliver location-based shopping rewards to consumers for visiting stores.

By early 2011, rewards will be delivered at all Crate and Barrel locations in the United States via shopkick applications. Crate and Barrel is the third new retail partner within the last month, further accelerating the speed at which the shopkick location-based shopping application is gaining scale. 

“Shopkick starts a dialogue with our shoppers right when they walk in, turning our stores into interactive worlds,” said Sascha Bopp, chief operating officer of Crate and Barrel, Chicago. “We are proud to join shopkick’s powerful alliance of America’s best retail brands.

“We can now reward our customers just for coming to see us, and are excited to explore additional ways to interact with them on their smartphones through the shopkick app,” he said.

Crate and Barrel, a privately held company owned by the Otto Group of Hamburg, specializes in contemporary tabletop, kitchenwares, housewares and furniture designs.

The Crate and Barrel family of brands includes its more modern off-shoot, CB2, and childrens’ home furnishings retailer, The Land of Nod.

Shopkick is a startup funded by Kleiner Perkins’s iFund, Greylock Partners and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and investor in Facebook and Zynga.

In August 2010, shopkick launched a mobile application that hands rewards and offers to consumers for walking into stores and malls.

In addition to Crate and Barrel, its brand partnerships including American Eagle, Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority, Target, The Wet Seal and Simon Property Group, which claims to be the largest mall operator in the United States.

Crate and Barrel moving the needle with mobile
Crate and Barrel is the first shopkick retail partner who signed on for nationwide rollout of the program right from the beginning.

This Saturday, Dec. 18, in time for holiday shopping, Crate and Barrel shoppers can start earning rewards and offers at all Crate and Barrel stores in the greater Chicago and New York metropolitan areas by walking in with the shopkick application on their smartphones.

Within weeks, shopkick will be live in all Crate and Barrel locations nationwide, with complete rollout expected by February 2011.

The shopkick app detects a shopkick Signal emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating store to deliver rewards called kickbucks to each user.

Kickbucks can be collected at all partner stores and redeemed for in-store gift card rewards or discounts at top retail stores, song downloads, movie tickets, hotel vouchers, Facebook Credits to play games online and donations to 30 different causes and charities.

And, because the detection occurs on the user’s mobile device, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user’s control.

The shopkick application also lets users get even more kickbucks for scanning and learning about products and services.

Users can receive special offers, for example, a discount on specific products at participating retailers or double the kickbucks for check-in during promotional periods.

Participants can earn kickbucks from every retailer and redeem them at any partner retailer.

Currently more than 1,100 individual stores across multiple retailers and 100 of the country’s largest malls have fully deployed shopkick’s technology.

In addition, at more than 230,000 other stores nationwide, shopkick offers smaller rewards for checking-i” and scanning products from leading brands, including Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble.

The shopkick application is available for free for the iPhone and Android devices.

“Of course we’ve just announced the partnership, but it’s especially great that all Crate and Barrel stores nationwide will be shopkick-enabled already in the next quarter – that’s huge,” said Cyriac Roeding, cofounder/CEO of shopkick, Palo Alto, CA. “It’s a great proof point to the positive impact we’re already having on our partner retailers’ efforts.

“We’re delivering foot traffic, and we’re turning the stores of some of the country’s leading retailers into interactive worlds via smartphones,” he said. “Crate and Barrel is a fantastic extension of our alliance.”

Final Take
Mr. Roeding