• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, March 24, 2025

With deep ties to the world of branded content, Orme founders Faisal Ahmed and Bob D’Loren want to revolutionize the social side of commerce -- an industry expected to encompass $2.9 trillion in transactions by 2026.

Still in the very early stages of their vision to make Orme the standard in social commerce, Ahmed and D’Loren are betting on reimagined QVC-style selling practices to determine that the future of social commerce can thrive outside of major social-media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok.

Orme is a budding beauty-focused, social-commerce marketplace launched in partnership with Xcel Brands.

“True social commerce should preserve content, make it shoppable and shareable without any friction whatsoever,” says D’Loren. Alongside Ahmed, he is focused on delivering a product that eradicates all the tension points in the current social-commerce experience.

“There is no end-to-end technology ecosystem that removes all the friction from the process,” he tells MediaPost, citing the fact that shoppable content on major social platforms takes the user away to an ecommerce site. “I don't have the patience for that," he says. "Most people don’t.”

After a year in the making, Orme officially launched in January 2024 after securing a 30% investment from D’Loren's media and consumer products company Xcel Brands, which specializes in livestream shopping and owns luxury fashion brands like Isaac Mizrahi, Judith Ripka and Halston.

If you download the Orme app, the aesthetic will remind you of TikTok -- except all the content is shoppable and centered around high-end beauty brands, like Bime Beauty, Ideo, Masami and Shayde Beauty. This is one strategic way that Orme is trying to set itself apart from video-commerce on major social platforms.

“If you look at TikTok, there are 245 beauty brands and all of them are low- to medium-quality,” Ahmed notes. “If I want to buy an expensive brand, why would I go to TikTok? I'll go to the brand's website.”

On Orme, users are able to find high-end beauty products, showcased in entertaining videos made by knowledgeable creators, backed by the brand, which then sends the product directly to the consumer.

“We don’t touch the customer journey at all,” D’Loren adds. “We’re a technology switch.” Utilizing this approach, Orme expects to do $100 million in sales -- about 1% of the total luxury beauty market with Reels on Instagram -- within the first year.

Orme also describes itself as a more transparent and monetizable option for brands and creators, promising enhanced privacy and higher ROI.

“It's the opposite of how social platforms work,” D’Loren says. “Their revenue model is to sell ad dollars, and in many ways, that is at odds with influencers making money. Our model is very different.”

Orme operates off a revenue-sharing -- or pay-for-performance -- model. Brands don’t pay anything until they make a sale on the platform, creators make commissions based on sales made from their content, which can even be recycled and re-polished from their other social media accounts.

Ahmed describes the monetization of Orme content like a record label: a creator should be compensated for every sale derived from their content, especially when someone uses their content and amplifies it for their own needs. This model effectively prioritizes skilled creators who are able to amass large followings in the beauty space.

Furthermore, everyday users who repost content from Orme to other social platforms earn 6% of every sale they are involved with as well, incentivizing the community to participate.

While most platforms pay vendors within 60 days, Orme promises to pay vendors immediately.

Using the online payment gateway Stripe, D’Loren says that Orme splits payments at checkout, which speeds up payouts that users can track in real-time directly on the app.

Orme has also decided to upend the model enforced by its competitors, like Ulta, Sephora, Macy’s and Nordstrom, which control the market that Orme is focused on.

“Beauty brands give a 70% margin to Ulta and Sephora, and they only keep 30%, and still they make money,” explains Ahmed. “We are basically flipping the model, giving 70% to the beauty brands and 30% to us.”

To prompt more in-app sales, the platform also uses an old QVC-style trick that surprisingly no other social commerce platform has thought to use.

Below a seller's video, there is an inventory tracker that updates in real-time, telling viewers how many more products there are in stock. As the number ticks down, interested users are likely to feel pressure to purchase.

In addition, D’Loren and Ahmed say that creators will be able to stream their content live from QVC on Orme, with the brand authorizing the cross-format livestream.

“The systemic problem with all the linear TV sellers is their distribution is declining 5 to 7% per year because of cable cutting,” notes D’Loren. “They have to find livestream digital platforms that they can capture some of that distribution again.”

In other words, Orme is setting itself up to become a whole new point of distribution for linear TV players as well.

But for Orme to truly work, more brands, more users and more sellers must buy into Ahmed and D’Loren's vision.

Right now, that is Orme’s main priority. That is why it recently launched a new feature that allows popular beauty sellers to monetize Instagram video content by sending consumers who comment “Buy” on a Reel a direct message with a link to a brand’s ecommerce store on Orme -- a neat, but temporary, process.

“If we had the audience on Day One, we would not be looking at funneling traffic from Instagram,” says Ahmed. “We are trying to get creators to bring in the users. This is a temporary bridge that we will shut.”

Right now, Orme has 18 brands on its platform and about 30K users -- it has a long way to go.