Shop Smart LLC

Who owns Brad's Deals?
Brad's Deals is owned by Shop Smart LLC, a private, employee-owned company founded by Brad Wilson in 2001. Wilson remains CEO, and the company has no outside investors.

Is Shop Smart LLC a public company?
No. Shop Smart LLC is a private limited liability company. It does not trade on any stock exchange and does not publish audited financial statements.

Where is Shop Smart LLC headquartered?
The company is operationally headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with a mostly remote workforce. Its legal entity is domiciled in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

How does Shop Smart LLC make money?
The company earns affiliate commissions when shoppers click through Brad's Deals links and complete purchases at partner retailers, plus revenue from on-site and newsletter advertising.

How many employees does Shop Smart LLC have?
The company employs roughly 55 to 80 people, most of whom work remotely across the United States. It describes itself as an employee-owned organization.

Brad Wilson founded the business in 2001 while studying at the University of North Carolina. Frustrated by textbook prices at the campus bookstore, he compiled a page of cheaper online sources and circulated it among classmates. The page spread, and Wilson built it into a general deals site aimed at students before expanding to a broader audience.

The company formalized as Shop Smart LLC, doing business as Brad's Deals, and settled operationally in Chicago. Through the 2000s it added coupon codes, printable in-store coupons and seasonal guides. Its Black Friday coverage became a signature feature, generating large traffic surges each November as shoppers researched doorbusters and online discounts.

The business model never changed: the service stays free, and revenue arrives as affiliate commissions from retailers such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, Macy's, Nike and Home Depot, plus display advertising. Unlike most competitors, the company never raised capital. In the 2010s it reorganized internally as an employee-owned firm and shifted to a mostly remote workforce, with staff spread across the United States and a handful of overseas contractors.

Two industry disruptions tested the model. First, the daily-deals wave led by Groupon pulled consumer attention toward prepaid vouchers before collapsing. Second, browser extensions such as Honey (acquired by PayPal for about $4 billion in 2020) and Capital One Shopping automated coupon discovery, taking transactional traffic from editorial deal sites. Brad's Deals responded by leaning into human curation, positioning its hand-verified picks against algorithmic aggregation.

As of 2026, the company remains independent under Wilson's leadership. Its newsletter counts millions of subscribers, its apps have passed two million downloads, and it continues to publish daily deal roundups, shopping advice and verified coupon codes.

As a small, remote-first digital company, Shop Smart's environmental footprint is limited to cloud infrastructure and distributed employees rather than physical facilities or logistics. The company does not publish a formal sustainability report, which is typical for businesses of its size.

Its consumer-advocate positioning carries an implicit ethical claim: deals are verified by humans, and the service is free with no subscription or data-harvesting checkout layer. The company collects standard web and email engagement data to operate its affiliate model.