Last summer when our new home was under renovation, I ordered a chandelier from Restoration Hardware. I was planning to have the contractors installing it in the dining room while they were working on the ceiling. The contractors were so nice. They wanted to make sure the ceiling had enough support for the installation and pre-drilled a hole for ease of installation. To do that, they needed the chandelier’s installation instructions. So I called Restoration Hardware and to their surprise, they couldn’t find the installation instructions. They have the instructions for all other models, just not the one I have ordered. The customer service reps did try their best to hunt down the instructions from their supplier but after a week or so they still came back to me empty handed. It was very disappointing.

As online shopping becomes part of our daily lives, everyone must have done some product comparisons when buying a camera on Best Buy, or checking out the dimensions of a piece of furniture on IKEA’s website. We all appreciate accurate and detailed product information on the internet. Unfortunately, inefficient and inaccurate information flow within the complex supply chain not only impedes enterprises in conducting businesses, but also affects consumers in making purchase decisions.

Therefore, we totally get the value of Hubba, the fastest growing network dedicated to sharing and updating product information among brands, distributors and retailers.

In their own words:

“We believe that the key to fixing things is sharing. There is a game of broken telephone going on. The biggest obstacle is getting information from the manufacturer/brand into the hands of retailers, eCommerce websites and all of the other touch-points with the consumer.”

“We believe that we can solve this. We created our B2B Product Information Network to be the easiest way to share information. It is an ugly, complicated world of structured and unstructured product data, but we love a good challenge.”

Hubba not only builds technology that allows brands, distributors and retailers to share information, but it is also a network that connects brands and retailers in a many-to-many fashion. This unique approach to solve the problem creates deeper relationships among brands and retailers as well as delivering rich and accurate information to the consumers.

Today, we are so excited to announce our investment in Hubba. We believe the team led by our friends Ben Zifkin and Howard Lis will be able to fix this broken telephone and make the information flow far more efficient and accurate than it is now. Furthermore, brands and retailers will greatly benefit from the connections they make in this network. 

This investment in Hubba is also very special to us because Brightspark Ventures led their seed round. It’s such an honour that we are now co-investing with Brightspark’s Mark Skapinker. Both Allen and myself were Brightspark alumnus and we both started our career at Delrina, the firm that Mark co-founded. The founders of both Brightspark and Delrina have been our mentors in entrepreneurship for many years. Their mentorship greatly helped us in becoming contributors in the tech startup ecosystem in Toronto. We look forward to contributing to our community, just like what they did and are still doing.

– Eva