Hot on the heels of a $112 million round of funding, home decor site One Kings Lane announces the hire of former Zappos CTO Arun Rajan to lead its technology initiatives.
The online retail giant Zappos is famously — almost fanatically — customer-service focused, and One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack tells Business Insider that Rajan's customer-centric approach from four years at Zappos makes him an ideal choice for CTO.
Rajan's first priorities at the company will be aggressively building the technology team, creating better tools for scalability and accelerated business growth, and strengthening the personalized customer experience for One Kings Lane shoppers.
Mack says that his goal for the whole company is to scale to a larger audience this year (though he doesn't see its product line expanding beyond home goods and decor).
Rajan will join another recent hire: Chief Product Officer David Yu, who joined One Kings Lane from Gilt Groupe. Mack also tells us that last week, One Kings Lane was accepted into Bridge, a network for connecting startups and designers that is only open to about half a dozen select design-focused companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb and Pinterest.
"To create great experiences, you need a marriage of technology, product management and design," Macks says. "And now we're all-systems-go with all three. It's an exciting time for One Kings Lane."