Coolspotters, a new site from Connecticut based startup Fanzter, will launch later today. It’s an eye-candy celebrity-focused site that shows users the products celebrities are wearing in various photos. Users can then talk about and, of course, purchase those items.
Users can track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. The idea is to show connections between people and stuff. These connections are called “spots” (as in, “I spotted that”), and show details on the item. If something is incorrect, users can change or remove it, and add new people and things.
There are other services that try to help people find products that celebrities use. Like.com is a visual search engine that lets people find related products based on visual patters. And SeenOn shows clothing and other items used by celebrities in TV shows, which can then be purchased.
But Coolspotters is the first collaborative site that gets users to do most of the work. It’s essentially a structured data wiki (see our coverage of Political Base and our own CrunchBase, which use the same ideas to track politicians/issues and startups/entrepreneurs, respectively). The end result is a ton of highly structured, highly valuable information. Users can sit for hours clicking around and finding related things. And in the case of Coolspotters, buy stuff.
Parent company Fantzer was founded in mid 2007 by Aaron LaBerge, Eric Kirsten and Sujal Shah and has raised $2 million in venture funding.
See their the Coolspotters CrunchBase profile for more screen shots.
pretty good idea. i just think that most of the items could be too expensive for the audience.
$2 million for a site with a business model and with features on its website which can be copied without any legal problem and with just a few hundred bucks?
Maybe the investors mixed the founders with celebrities and think they also need millions.
Mike ,
you should learn to switch off and take some sleep once in a while
this is an Odd time to work
I like the idea of the company.. Even if the items are too expensive it is fun to know EXACTLY what the celebs are wearing. Knowing the prices and the brand make it more real and the dream closer to a reality!! And if there are some things that are in budget it would be great to know where to purchase them.
Love this article. Glad I’m a follower. Keep up the good work.
The problem with these types of companies is that you won’t know EXACTLY what the celebs are wearing. You’ll get people’s best guesses as to what they think they are wearing. Most celebs don’t even know what they are wearing half of the time. Their stylists troll vintage and thrift stores, get one-of-a-kind samples from designers, and try to create unique looks that can’t be duplicated easily. Delivery Agent (parent company of SeenOn) actually works with the set decorators and stylists to get as much information as possible directly from the source and even they find the process to be a nightmare. Also, Delivery Agent has had a crowd-sourced “spotting” service component to their site for close to two years now and it has never got much traction. Also, keep in mind that much of what celebs wear to premieres and on-set will either be available to the public months after the event (it can take a while for runway fashion to make it to H&M) or months before the event (movies spend 6 months easy in post production). The biggest expense this company will have is in the licensing rights to the photos being featured from WireImage, Getty, etc. This will be a very difficult business to grow.
Mike, you just made our day
Hollywood crap for retarded consumer droids. Yummy.
Super idea. It should do very well.
Hey everyone,
I’m one of the co-founders of Coolspotters, and I’d love to share a bit of our perspective…
Coolspotters goes far beyond fashion and celebrities. True, we allow people to discover the clothes being worn by their favorite celebs (which, by the way, include athletes, musicians, business icons, politicians, etc.), but as you’ll see when you use the site, users can also see the movies/TV shows they’ve appeared in, the cell phones they use, the cars they drive, the colleges they graduated from, the charities they’re involved with, and even the pets they have. Coolspotters, above all else, is an association engine for lovers of pop-culture. The presentation of the information is very visual, and the content creation process is simple enough for anyone to use.
Regarding the point above about users not knowing exactly what is being spotted, this is where the wisdom of crowds comes into play. Our tools encourage editing and the refinement of content, the Spots that are not perfect will be improved as users add their knowledge. There are millions of subject matter experts out there who could spot a pair of Ray-Ban 3025 sunglasses, a pair of True Religion jeans, or a bottle of Propel Water from a mile away. Just a few hundred of these product gurus or entertainment buffs would make for a pretty rich experience for everyone else who comes to the site for information.
We hope you enjoy it! The site will be live very soon…
I like the idea - I liked it when I had it about 5 years ago too. Kudos to them for the work they have done.
My thoughts on the exclusivity of products is this: so what.
Oscar dress knock offs are available about 24 hours after the celebs walk down the red carpet. Any established high end product usually has a more reasonably priced alternative that 99% percent of us would be happy with. Now, with the proper exposure, this site is poised to be the gateway for such things.
I echo Dan’s concern about accuracy. Users just name what they think the stars are wearing? Seems like it would be hard to tell, especially on items like jeans that might be difficult to distinguish.
It would be interesting if the site also offered similar, lower-priced alternatives so users could actually get the look.
Eric,
I wish you the best. But I’m very familiar with your space and just don’t see your business model. StarStyle — one of the competitors in your space who flamed out last year — had a deal directly with the production company behind American Idol. They knew exactly what the contestants were going to wear before the shows even aired. And they couldn’t really do anything with that information since the clothes weren’t available for sale any place online. In order to make money from that “association” they had to fake a “similar” association with a product that was actually being sold. At that point, the authenticity of the service breaks down since consumers aren’t really getting what they were originally interested in.
As another example, let’s take the “Jennifer Aniston’s sweater” scenario that people have thrown about when it comes to product placement for the last decade. If someone was to identify the sweater Jennifer Aniston wore in the season finale of “Friends” — pretending we’ve just traveled back in time and have just seen the episode — they would be identifying a sweater that was available 3-4 months in the past (when the show was filmed). By that time, in terms of real-world retail fashion cycles, that sweater would be very difficult to find in stores.
Therefore, monetizing the styles that celebrities wear is a very difficult business beyond selling ads. You won’t generate much revenue through actual sales leads.
So even if crowd-sourcing does work in your model, it’s difficult to build a real business based on these associations.
The dirty little secret about Delivery Agent/SeenOn is that they make most of their money from their fulfillment services (warehousing/shipping/etc.). They store the Project Runway stuff that they sell on their site and get a commission for handling that transaction from Bravo/NBC. Again, not a very high-growth business model.
On a more positive note, I think your site design is terrific.
wow, looks like an opportunity that should have been covered by http://www.overlay.tv - they totally missed this…
It’s a winner - regardless of my negative views on celebrities and faddy crap.
It’s so totally a winner - to say it in the language of users of this kind of sites.
Mmm, Coolspotters is a good site, I too sometimes interesting to know something more about celebrities.
Eric,
great idea. this can really work. Everyday people love celebs. Period. They are lemmings. They want to be like them in ways most of us can’t fathom. Once you understand that concept, you can use it to your advantage to grow your user base quickly.
Coolspotters sounds like it’ll be a huge hit. Yeah, I may not be able to afford all the same things as the celebs, but you have to admit they have cool stuff. And it’s a great idea to be able to see it all in one spot whether I’m interested in buying it or just looking for fun. Also could be really helpful when looking for gifts for someone who really like a particular celeb or movie.
There is a large market for the clothing sites that want to advertise for those products that are worn. Lots of folks in the midwest that think hollywood is a fashion meca (it isnt) and have no idea what to wear. That is why they look to celebs and a fashion line can take off if even a b-list wears something to the airport.
Eric, I would love it if you could approve my beta request. Thanks!
Hey guys,
I’m the co-founder of http://www.edopter.com, a site that launched a couple months ago.
Edopter combines user insight with worldwide buzz to find the next big trend. We call it ’social trendcasting’.
Users can create and follow trends, share and discuss them - then watch as they spread across the world. We’re just finishing a redesign that will be launching this week, which also includes the first of several visualization tools.
We’re not a product guide, our focus is on the next big people, places, things, ideas, fashion, entertainment, and even web-memes.
Check it out and let me know if you have any questions! http://www.edopter.com
Polyvore also lets users re-create celebrity looks using real products - check out this Jessica Simpson outfit: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?id=1176375 , and here’s a Brad Pitt outfit for the dudes: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?id=1232265
@21 - Dude you went to all that trouble to pitch your website and you got a typo in your URL…doh.
@Dan.
good analysis.
free money for Eric, if he wants it.
@Tim G thanks http://www.edopter.com or http://www.edopter.com/howitworks
I’m pretty skeptical of these type of sites, and people close to me have worked - note the past tense
- at one of the companies you listed as existing competitors. It’s very hard to profit off of these things…I don’t think the audience is as interested as they might seem.
Sure, the magazines have the ‘what are they wearing’ crap in there, but those sections makes up a few pages out of hundreds. The rest is dedicated to all the gossip and whatnot, which is similarly popular online (Perez, Defamer, etc). I’m not confident the clothes-only stuff can stand on its own, whether in terms of generating enough pageviews for ads *or* selling enough affiliate merch to make it worthwhile (or a combination of the two).
I give Like.com a bit of a break because you can browse products that are ‘like’ something you have in mind, but these pure celeb-chaser sites just don’t cut it IMO.
Get Interactive allows the consumer to click into videos, anywhere they are being seen. We know exactly what the brand is because we work directly with the brand, offering them very low CPC rates for incredible visibility and a highly qualified consumer. We split the revenue with the content provider which gets them engaged to further promote the “get button” and literally provides them a found revenue source.
I really like this idea! I usually don’t readily admit it, but I do like those ‘what they are wearing’ features in magazines
so it’s great to see this concept taken to the next level.
I would agree that there are folks out there who can spot a particular item immediately. Again, I don’t usually talk about it, but I can spot a wide range of clothing brands from a great distance. I’m not sure why, but it’s always been something I can do.
As others have mentioned, I can see that fulfillment could be a problem. I just poked at a few items, but it seems like there are not links to purchase every item. Is that because nobody has submitted a retailer?
It would be great if there was an easy way to submit a place to purchase a given item. I’m not 100% sure, but I think a lot of the designer clothes on sale at eBay comes from stylists, fashion shoots, etc. I’ve never been really compelled to buy any of it because there is no context (i.e. no model/celeb is wearing it). But if you provide a way for someone to associate their auction with a celeb you have profiled; or just give them a way to auction from your site, I think you could solve a bit of your fulfillment problem.
I also think some of the best and latest clothes are still found in brick and mortar stores rather than online. If you could get the individual boutiques to use your site, you could be providing a way of advertising what they have. Even a simple yelp-like format where a store could say they have a certain item would be really helpful. I imagine most of your initial set of customers will be in reasonably fashion-centric areas like NYC, SF, LA, etc so a lot of the good boutiques will be local anyways. In time, maybe your site could help some of these stores do small-scale online retailing.
I hate to rain on your parade by crunchbase is generally useless.
Is the idea based off the book?
I’m worried that the local stores will run out of the pants I like the most if they begin being worn by superstars!
“The end result is a ton of highly structured, highly valuable information.”
Correction: The end result is a ton of highly structured information.
Valuable? Umm… no. This is a bit too serious - it’s actually creepy, helping people stalk others. Everyone is entitled to waste their free time on anything they want but there is something inherently evil about obsessive celebrity stalking.
Ok, so this looks like a blatant rip-off of DressLikeMe http://www.dresslikeme.co.uk/
They have been doing this for some time and now have a really honed fashion sense.
For Coolspotters the issue of getting EXACT matches is the hole and not the donut for them. The real issue is getting people to actually participate. Yes, people can spot True Religion jeans and yes I can spot if a bottle is labeled Propel but the value of this concept is getting people to identify products that aren’t easily identifiable. The fact of the matter is most people don’t know and it will be hard to build any scale with the limited number of people who do know. It comes back to a basic marketing question, what need are you fullfilling? For the 95% of visitor who won’t participate in the matching you miiiight be letting them know about a product on a celebrity they are interested in. For the 5% of visitors who are participating, I don’t see what there incentive is out side of a “look what I know” feeling, which will fade fast.
I don’t think this site is trying to reinvent the wheel on identifying stuff. From what I can tell from using the site (and I think this is really smart by the way), is that coolspotters takes all of the connections that are out there somewhere online or in magazines and puts them all under one roof. the point is, the stuff on coolspotters has ALREADY been identified somewhere else so i think that anyone who has issues with the site offering “exact matches” etc are way off. the site seems more like a search engine for celebs, fashioin and entertainment than anything else.
and @33 - dresslikeme?? have you compared teh two sites? nothing alike from what i can see and i used coolspoters for a couple hours yesterday.
I’m also a little concerned about the liability incurred from all of the copyrighted photos being uploaded.