Think Different. This is the campaign that the late Steve Jobs made popular celebrating those individuals that saw the world in a different light and acted upon those visions. Joaquin Ruiz the CEO of Catalog Spree certainly qualifies for the campaign that the former Apple founder made popular.
Years before iPads came to market Ruiz conceived Catalog Spree, an application that sought to “provide an immersive, joyful, and social shopping experience.” Launching in 2011 with seven retail partners, Catalog Spree has revamped the App Store by creating a “Catalogs” category and “invented a new way to shop online.”
A self-proclaimed engineer and research scientist at heart, Ruiz received his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and worked with companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Gear6. The entrepreneur understood that he wanted to be a part of a “movement in an area with a great potential for success, ” and inspired by the Kindle, Ruiz and his team saw that there was potential in mobile shopping and combining catalogs, books and shopping.
The team sought to create an enjoyable user experience and “leveraged the web and cloud computing capabilities” to ensure users wouldn’t have to wait for catalogs to load.
With over 200 retailers on board, Ruiz hopes to expand the catalog selection so that shoppers have access to even more products and brands. The CEO also hopes to explore blurring offline (print) and the online experience.
Catalog Spree is available in the App Store.
Advice from Joaquin Ruiz
- Be meticulous. Make sure you gain experience and look at what really matters. Also, pay attention and focus people on one objective. Companies fall apart because they are not focused in the same direction.
- Measure everything, work on something over and over again and improve. You have to launch, test, measure and improve things quickly. For example, Google can measure and work quickly.
- The key to a great app is the user experience. It is important to go back and sharpen things. It will improve the flow of the app. Also, it must be easy to develop so it can succeed.