San Francisco-based ShopStyle wants to be the Google of fashion, combining retail with powerful search and recommendation features.
ShopStyle merged with the publishing firm Sugar in September this year. It employs 80 staff, was initially backed by legendary Silicon Valley investor Mike Moritz at Sequoia Capital and took extra funding from NBC Universal this year.
Founder and general manager Andy Moss explains how it works.
ShopStyle founder Andy Moss
• Explain your business to my Mum
"ShopStyle is a shopping site for fashion. We bring together all the best brands and most fashionable department stores and shops – and let you search and browse the broadest selection of clothes and accessories that are available online. It makes shopping for fashion, easy, convenient and fun. You can also create and share stylish looks, either based upon the latest trends or simply drawing upon personal inspirations, to mix, match and save your favourite items in a personalised StyleBook – which is a bit like your own online fashion collage or scrapbook."
• How does that work?
"It's a bit like Google for fashion. For shopping, we'll help you find the Diane von Furstenberg dress you are looking for and redirect you to the online store that carries the item to make the actual purchase. For the styling element of the site, simply create a profile and style away."
• How do you make money?
"Retailers pay us a commission for each sale we generate."
• Name your closest competitors
"In the UK the other players in our space are probably StyleFinder and OSoYou, but neither really do what we do."
• What's your background?
"My background is technology, as opposed to fashion."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"ShopStyle has grown rapidly to about 2 million monthly unique visitors; the Sugar sites as a whole generate over 8 million. I would expect to be able to double our traffic over the next 12 months."
• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"ShopStyle enables social shopping with our user community picking the clothes and creating stylebooks to share with friends. We make it easy to browse other people's stylebooks for inspiration."
• Any weird business experiences so far?
"We produced a TV commercial for our US site that includes a computer-generated monster that is entirely fabricated from designer clothes, which probably sounds quite weird."
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
"I don't think so. The online businesses that are being started and funded in 2008 have to have either proven traffic and/or revenue potential. You needed neither in 1999."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"Finding enough hours in the day. To be honest, I only have time for two things: my kids and work.>
• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
"The usual suspects: Google, Apple, and Amazon."
• What's the most important piece of software or web tool that you use each day?
"Don't try to take my iPhone away!"
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"The starting point for anyone shopping for fashion."
So what do you think?
• Aren't there too many retail sites now? Which ones will withstand the credit crunch?
• Why do traditional high street brands perform so badly online, compared to web-only fashion retail sites?
• How can this site differentiate itself from its rivals?
