Salvatore Barras (21) and Kyri Ioulianou (19) are the brains behind MiBrand, an app aimed at changing the way consumers interact with their favourite brands and retailers.
The young partners established their Bedfordview-based company, Firmaspace, which created the app, in January.
According to the co-founders, the app, which was recently introduced, was designed with both the retailer and shopper in mind. It aims to change the way consumers connect with malls by providing quick and easy access to information such as retail store discounts, special offers, and events hosted by bars and restaurants.
Barras, founder and director of MiBrand, says the app features around 400 stores around Bedfordview. It is also connected to all shopping malls in the area, and he plans to expand it nationally over the next six months.
"Unlike the concept of a traditional e-commerce shopping application, MiBrand is designed to bring foot traffic to stores with the aim of providing the shoppers with an experience that starts before they leave the house. When they walk into a mall, the customers' live feed displays all of the specials in the mall.
"So shoppers know exactly where the specials and discounts are taking place and they know where to go. It focuses on driving consumers to brick-and mortar-stores, while also aiming to increase business for the retailers," he explains.
The young business partners recently secured R1 million worth of funding and infrastructure support from an undisclosed property developer in Johannesburg, who now owns a 50% stake in the company.
"We came up with this concept last year after we got tired of being faced with the problem of not having an efficient connection to stores in our community, so MiBrand was born. The app is broken down into four tabs, such as the 'live feed' which consists of a list of all the specials happening in your location, the 'discovery grid' which features 16 categories of stores, and a 'search bar' which allows you to search for specific stores, products, or services.
"The 'MiBrand tab' gives the user quick access to the stores they regularly visit and what the store has on offer, and they can add the specials to 'my cart'. Users can also share specials with friends on social media," he points out.
The app was coded on a Java-based, cross-platform application, explains Kyriakos Ioulianou, co-founder and director of Firmaspace. It uses the phone's GPS in co-ordination with a server backend to retrieve only the nearest stores instead of retrieving all of them and then ordering them based on location, thus saving on data, he says.
"Normalised tables are used in a secure back-end to link stores to their vouchers while linking users to the stores. The search algorithm uses full text search queries in conjunction with wildcard operators. In future, we will incorporate a mall GPS similar to Google Maps to assist shoppers to navigate the mall while measuring foot traffic at different locations in the mall," Ioulianou adds.
Another similar app recently introduced in Johannesburg is FATTi, developed by property holdings company Atterbury. The app provides shopping mall visitors with access to different promotions in the form of loyalty-based promotions, discount tokens, mobile online payment for parking and access to WiFi.
In the pilot project, Atterbury and Attacq introduced this technology to the jointly-owned R1.3 billion Newtown Junction shopping centre in the Johannesburg central business district.
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