Everything to Sell Anything Announcement | Squarespace

Over the past year and a half, we've seen the trends of the last 2 decades accelerate at a light-speed pace. Many people became entrepreneurs by necessity. Others pivoted their existing businesses and hobbies to adapt to an increasingly digital world. That change is now a constant, and it's the reason why digital retail commerce grew 44% in 2020. Still, e-commerce is only 21% of the retail economy. Here's a prediction. Over the next few years, many of you will experiment with selling your time, ideas, expertise, or a physical product online. We're seeing expansion of classes, online and in-person services, appointments, reservations, and more. This is how businesses and personal brands grow. That's key to our vision and why Squarespace is scaling our offering to provide you with all the tools you need to sell any type of product or service in parallel. And now I'd like to hand it over to the team to show you all the incredible innovations and new features we have in store and how they can help you thrive in the years to come.

Squarespace is here to help you sell your products and services, and video is by far the best means of audience engagement. Now, there are hundreds of tools to create video content, but most of them require a steep learning curve to achieve professional results. They're hard to use, difficult to master, and the results look amateur. Until now. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce our newest product in 2021, Squarespace Video Studio. Point at a page, choose a theme, and the Video Studio will pull your logo, your product, and your color palette automatically. With just a few clicks and zero editing, you'll have a high-impact 30 to 60-second promo video that looks like you've spent thousands of dollars on a production team and dozens of hours editing. Need a voiceover? No problem. Record your own, or— and this is really uncanny— just upload a script and instantly you'll hear a pro-level voice in your own words. No extra pain, no extra cost. Now with Video Studio, it's incredibly simple to produce beautiful product videos that make your Squarespace ecommerce site a sales machine.

Entrepreneurs looking to sell products online today have a lot of options. For many, a marketplace like Etsy is a great place to start. Marketplaces make it easy to get up and running quickly, reach a captive audience of prospective customers, and test new product ideas. As marketplace sellers grow their business, they need creative freedom to express their brands and build direct customer relationships, in addition to continuing to drive new audiences through marketplaces. Our platform is the ideal place for them to be able to invest in both, as our Etsy integrations for product and reviews make it easy for you to have your own website and continue to manage your Etsy store efficiently. With Squarespace, you have complete control over the look and feel of your online store. You can give your customers a consistent brand experience across their favorite marketplaces and your own website with rich product listings, embedded videos, related products, subscriptions, blogs, and more. Order fulfillment is simple and flexible to fit your business too. Easily set up shipping and give customers the option to pick up their orders in person at your store Storefront or at fairs and markets. After the sale, nurture customer loyalty with email campaigns that will keep them coming back, and you can easily introduce new offerings like selling appointments or content to your customer base. You can have the best of both worlds with Squarespace, combining the discoverability of marketplaces with an online store of your own.

Whether you're a therapist, stylist, financial planner, or yoga studio, The most valuable thing you sell is your time. There's a finite number of days in the week and hours in the day, so it's important that you get it right. Squarespace Scheduling takes the management out of time management. Hundreds of thousands of businesses use it for creating, selling, and booking appointments and classes every month. Sellers set their availability, services, and prices, and appointments are published and payments collected via their Squarespace website social media, text, or email. Last year alone, hundreds of millions of consumers used Squarespace Scheduling to book appointments using their browser or mobile device, as well as review availability, pricing, and differentiated offerings. Customers trusted us with billions of dollars in transactions in just the last year alone, which means that while their business models may vary, they all spent less time managing, and more time selling.

Great hospitality experiences are our collective treasured memories. Tock was built to enable the hospitality industry to connect directly and transparently with their customers while making it easy to remember their preferences and special occasions, keep them in the know about future events, and create magical moments. Tock is the only fully integrated end-to-end system that empowers reservations, events, and to-go across 3 reservation types: free ordinary bookings, deposit reservations to minimize no-shows, and prepaid reservations for those high-demand experiences. This means that your business will sell more, minimize waste, and quite simply make more money. In turn, you can afford to reinvest in the experiences you create for your customers, making them better than ever before. It's a virtuous cycle, and it's made simple by Tock. But Tock is more than all of that. It's dynamic and variable pricing for all time-slotted businesses. We've had galleries and museums and distilleries, a whole bunch of different businesses use Tock to book and sell their services. Millions of consumers rely on Tock to explore and find new experiences. Tock is an elegant marketing and sales tool, not merely a reservation system. As part of Squarespace, Talk will continue to innovate at scale while forever being mindful that the people who create our culture and memories need our support more than they ever have before.

Last year, we launched Member Areas, a new tool designed to help our customers sell access to content through memberships. Cooking lessons, exercise classes, mindful meditation— whatever community you've built can be engaged at scale by creating private member subscription areas. Thousands of entrepreneurs did just that with huge success. Since then, we've seen many of our customers include videos in their memberships. We're excited to announce the ability to showcase and merchandise your video classes to your members in compelling ways. You can now organize, categorize, and curate your videos to showcase your classes beautifully and customize the presentation to fit your brand. Your audience can browse and find the class that's right for them using categories you define, such as class type or level of difficulty. You choose whether to charge them a one-time fee or offer recurring subscriptions for your membership. Selling access to video classes gives our customers a way to bring in passive income and create more flexibility in their schedules. Creators will be able to begin selling membership access to video classes later this year, and we're building even more ways for creators to monetize video over time.

When it comes to marketing your brand and growing your audience, social media continues to be one of the most important channels to engage new and existing customers. It's also a lot of work for entrepreneurs and content creators to keep up across multiple platforms, with social media trends constantly evolving and changing. That's why we offer Unfold, the all-in-one platform with everything you need to to be successful on social media. Over 1 billion stories have been created with our hundreds of beautifully designed templates, democratizing design by making it easy to create polished and professional social content. With Unfold, you can also edit your photos and videos directly in the app with unique filters and effects. And you can go beyond by uploading your own fonts, logos, colors with Brand Kit to ensure that every post aligns perfectly with your brand and your voice. But Unfold has been expanding way beyond content creation with tools to help entrepreneurs and social creators start monetizing immediately, grow their audiences, and even plan their content. Coming very soon, you will be able to schedule your posts weeks in advance across multiple Instagram accounts. Now anyone, no matter their size or skill, can access these sophisticated social media marketing tools. Unfold Bio Sites help you share all your important links in a simple, beautiful page optimized for social. Your link in bio has never been so powerful. Choose from one of our beautiful animated Bio Site templates and share your website, social networks, embed videos, and start monetizing your audiences directly with your Bio Site. Today's brands are built on social, and Unfold is everything entrepreneurs need to succeed on those platforms and bring the visitors back to their Squarespace site.

When a potential customer lands on your website, it takes them less than a second to decide how credible your business is. And the number one factor in their decision is design. If you don't pass that first test, you'll have more trouble selling effectively. That's why our commitment to providing the best web design tools in the industry remains unchanged. We're excited to announce multiple new features to help you customize the design of your website and help your business stand out and thrive. The first new feature to highlight is background art, which enables you to choose from a wide variety of gradients, shapes, and repeating patterns to use as a background for a section, all of which can also be animated. Auto layout is another incredible feature which greatly simplifies managing sets of related content while also providing new layout options. Turn lists of content such as product reviews, customer testimonials, product features, and more into interactive carousels and banner slideshows with a single click. Need to add additional content or rearrange the order? Just drag to reorder and let Auto Layout eliminate the hassle of moving and rearranging all the individual elements manually. And with our new image mask feature, you'll have a whole new level of creative freedom for how to present your site's photos with a wide variety of shapes to choose from. In the near future, you'll also be able to customize the look and feel of your site's top navigation bar with our new header effects, with the ability to apply gradients, borders, transparency, and background blur effects. Together, these improvements will help you use the power of design to make a strong first impression and build a unique presence that helps your business stand out.

To build a successful brand, you need to be consistent. Even the most stunning design choices won't do anything to your business if you don't apply them across every touchpoint you have with your customers. We're now making it easier for entrepreneurs to simplify this work and save time. As a Squarespace customer, you will be able to automatically apply brand elements from your website, like colors and logos, to both email campaigns and Unfold Bio Sites. You'll stand out by being recognizable and authentic wherever a customer engages with your brand. Encounters your business. In email campaigns, the new site styles feature applies your brand elements with a single click to make every email feel like a seamless extension of your site experience. The Unfold app generates your Bio Site automatically, making it the perfect companion to your website, carrying the look and feel of your brand across all your social channels. These new features make it easier to create consistency across channels so you can build brand recognition and be a pro from the start.

Today's entrepreneur is anyone with an internet connection, an idea, and the stamina to see it through. Squarespace is designing products for precisely this type of person. With the updates we're announcing today, many of which are already available, with others coming soon, we're making huge strides towards helping entrepreneurs make the most of their opportunities. From new ways to sell, to stand out, and new tools to connect with customers, Squarespace is everything to sell anything. And while I couldn't be prouder of the work that has gotten us to this point, there is much more to come as we deliver on this vision to help drive forward the new entrepreneurial economy.