PopSugar Inc. is an American media and technology company that is the parent to the media property PopSugar (stylized POPSUGAR) and a monthly subscription business PopSugar Must Have. The company was founded in 2006 by married couple Brian and Lisa Sugar as a pop culture blog.
The company is part of American digital holding company
Vox Media
Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company founded in Washington, D.C. with operational headquarters in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by CEO Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass ''S ...
.
History
Husband and wife Brian Sugar and Lisa Sugar founded PopSugar, in 2006, after a suggestion by blogger
Om Malik that Lisa turn her celebrity gossip hobby into a company. Brian became CEO and Lisa Editor-in-Chief, and they added venture capitalist
Michael Moritz to the board.
In 2007, the company acquired
ShopStyle, a fashion shopping
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
,
followed by acquisitions of Starbrand Media,
FreshGuide,
and Circle of Moms in 2012.
In 2013, the company officially changed its name from Sugar Inc. to PopSugar, and announced that it was profitable and had grown to over 450 employees.
In 2019, American digital holding company
Group Nine Media
Group Nine Media was an American digital media holding company based in New York City. The company comprises Thrillist, NowThis News, NowThis, The Dodo (website), The Dodo, and Seeker (media company), Seeker. The four brands, and former brand So ...
acquired PopSugar in an all-stock transaction.
Operations
PopSugar Inc operates the brands PopSugar and PopSugar Must Have. PopSugar features lifestyle content targeted towards women 18–34, across topics such as beauty, entertainment, fashion, fitness, food, and parenting, on mobile, video, and
social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
.
PopSugar Must Have was a subscription service that sent subscribers a monthly box of items curated by PopSugar editors. It also offered special edition boxes with retailers such as
CFDA,
Neiman Marcus, and
Target. Summer 2020 was the final PopSugar Must Have box.
Headquartered in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
, PopSugar is funded by
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...
and
Institutional Venture Partners.
The company also has offices in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, and New York.
References
External links
*
{{Vox Media
Fashion websites
Online retailers of the United States
2019 mergers and acquisitions
Internet properties established in 2006
2006 establishments in California
Companies based in San Francisco
Vox Media