The AR Show: Hannah and Matthew Arevalo (Pinfinity) on Fan Commerce and AR-enhance Collectible Pins
Jason McDowallFeb 8, 2021 at 11:58 pm1h 26min
Jason McDowall
Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall.
Jason McDowall
Today's conversation is with Hannah and Matthew Arevalo, two of the cofounders of Pinfinity an augmented reality collectible pin platform, enabling interactive experiences around our favorite brands. AR is seeping into many corners of our daily lives. And now it's coming to collectible pins, a category of collectibles popularized by Disney in the late 1990s. Previously, Pinfinity CEO Hannah Arevalo was the director of brands for several product lines at lootcrate. His subscription box business focused on fan culture. There she worked directly with brands such as Warner Brothers and Disney and lead a P&L of $100 million annually. She also helped the team garner more than a dozen industry awards around fast growth, great products and customer service. Matthew Arevalo was the co founder and chief innovation officer at Loot Crate, and has spent much of his career focused on developing brand, community and strategic business relationships. In this conversation, we focus on fan culture, the pin collectible movement, and how augmented reality fits into the bar concept Hannah and Matthew call fan commerce.
M
01:17Matthew Arevalo
I've always had this interest in ways that technology can bring people together. And that's kind of what the that that start was. And today, you know, Hannah, and I kind of call it fan commerce, where it's this idea that unlike traditional transactional e commerce, unlike, you know, traditional methods of distribution and retail and even of building a business, that by taking a fan focused, as opposed to just a customer focus interest, you can kind of build these solid communities and infrastructures around around businesses that will allow you to succeed even when there's challenges because you have this symbiotic relationship with who you're trying to reach. And they support you through those endeavors.
Jason McDowall
They go on to describe some of the lessons from their previous experience in a hybrid subscription box business, and how they are applying them to Pinfinity. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, thearshow.com. Let's dive in.
Jason McDowall
So it's it's really rare actually to meet a founding team. That's a married couple. It's a challenge in the best of times right to have a healthy long term married relationship, but to combine that with startup experienced business parents in general, but the startup experience, especially is really unique. How How did you two come together? Initially?
H
02:35Hannah Arevalo
Yeah, we met in 2005. I was in college, and Matthew was consulting. And we met we both were living in Orange County at the time, I grew up in San Diego and Matthew grew up in Los Angeles.
Processing audio...