StyleHop, a new fashion startup launching today, is looking to help users pick out the best outfits of the season without having to wade through countless user reviews.
The site ranks outfits on a five star scale based on user input. But instead of using a Hot-Or-Notesque stream of outfits to gather ratings, StyleHop offers a series of social games, each of which ask for a few ratings at a time so users don’t get bored. Included among these games is a Price Is Right-style Flash game that asks users to guess how much they think an individual item of clothing costs (between each round users are asked to rate a few outfits). To help instill a competitive atmosphere the site keeps track of how other users fare, which presumably leads players to continue playing the game (and rate more clothes). StyleHop also plans to offer games across popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace, so it can gain a large user base.
Using the data it collects from these games, the site can generate fashion recommendations to members (each outfit is tagged with certain attributes so broad trends can be established). For now the site is primarily concerning itself with college students, allowing users to view general clothing trends at certain universities.
StyleHop President David Reinke says that the company is going to generate a large portion of its revenues through affiliate fees as it directs users to online stores to purchase the items they see on the site. But the majority of StyleHop’s proceeds will come from specialized studies that the company will offer to retailers and designers as part of a premium subscription model. Clothing companies will be able to ask StyleHop to select a sample of users from a specific demographic, who will be invited to participate in studies where they’ll be asked to rate potential product offerings for the upcoming season. In return, participants will receive some form of compensation (like a gift card from the retailer).
There are countless fashion sites on the web, many of which allow users to rate their favorite outfits; examples include Chictopia (covered here) and Sugar Inc’s CelebStyle. StyleHop may have some difficulty differentiating itself at first, but the viral nature of its social games could help the site build up a substantial database of ratings, and its unique monetization model could prove to be very lucrative.
Good luck!
Clever approach. I hope my wife never finds this site
Sounds like fun and I like the mixed revenue model. Will require a direct sales force though, which will only work if they achieve scale.
Hi John. This is Dave from StyleHop. I wanted to join in on the conversation.
You are right that the private study model ultimately requires a sales force. Our model, like consumer review destinations in other verticals (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Netflix) focuses first on building out the consumer side of the house then driving revenue on b-to-b marketing analytics.
For 2009 and 2010 we will be testing our private study model leveraging the contacts of our fashion-laden board of advisors. The goal is to show that our wisdom of crowd demand forecasting model systematically improves upon the wholly qualitative merchant forecasting methods of today. Since every dollar saved in markdowns drops straight to the bottom line in fashion, even a little savings has a significant impact for these companies – our expectation is that selling costs will be relatively low given the contribution to direct operating profits we anticipate delivering to our clients.
David, I think this is a great idea. It’s one of the more well thought out revenue models that exist out there if you can generate the critical mass of traffic that yields enough quality data to sell. I think it’s a natural extension for more established social shopping sites and widget makers but the competition is so steep in this space that it would be hard for a startup to reach the scale without running out of money. The review sites you mentioned were very much first movers in their vertical during a time when people would fund anything.
What about narrowing your audience and focusing on a more specific and valuable shopper group that no one else is looking at? If you can own that niche and create a true competitive barrier, someone will pay you high marks for that type of information.
I hope I’m wrong and your games kick butt and are really viral.
Great idea and good luck!
Scott,
You make a really great point. There are a bunch of fashion sites out there trying to become a meaningful destination for social shopping.
I think you could argue, though, that none have meaningfully broken through to find a broad consumer audience. From my perspective, they are too narrowly focused on fashionistas and haven’t figured out how to add value to the vast majority of fashion consumers that are less interested in fashion and more interested solving the problem of more quickly and confidently making purchase decisions.
I don’t think it’s true that the first movers always win…especially if their models are flawed. What we are focusing on is helping deliver to women lists of styles we know they will like because they are top-ranked by their self-selected fashion peers. Ultimately, we want to be the destination women turn to for unbiased consumer reviews in fashion. No one else in our space has a meaningful plan to do this. Short of using social gaming (where we have patent rights), we also aren’t sure how our competition is going to consistently generate the thousands of style reviews/rankings required to be a review site in a fast-cycle product category.
We are focusing exclusively on college women for launch to try and limit the scope of our marketing and avoid competing head-to-head with the first movers until we gain traction.
Thanks for the great comment.
David
Founder, StyleHop
I Dont know how this will outlast. So what is the business model again??
bummer
Can teens like this concept?
Amazing!
This is an interesting idea of StyleHop. This can surely help in generating more concepts ins fashion designing.
Are they using the shopping comparision model? Just curious.
brilliant. go ahead and also http://www.eskibirsaat.com
Interesting
….
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? StyleHop Matches Social Gaming With The Fashion World [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/fd51a
I don’t know about this. I like my friend’s little project site better http://www.TimelessTrend.com. People can post tutorials and review each other’s style. Best of all, VC funding not needed.
Thanks to KickApps.
Great idea!!!
I don’t see it to be honest.
I don’t see that anyone would spend time doing this.
In fact that price is right game just seems to show people how overpriced garments can be.
You’re not the target audience.
it mainly target women and those who have a lot of money to spend, i guess.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
very interesting- hope it goes well for you!
This has tremendous potential, and I’m not just saying that because I went to high school with the guy behind it…
This looks like designers can bypass the focus group and go straight to the crowds to find out what to charge for their wares. Data out the ying-yang. Much marketing potential.
So it’s confirmed — at least two clever people from Mishawaka, Indiana.
Didn’t Patricia @ Style Diary this right the first time?
David, congrats on the article; hope all else is well!
Azeem
I never heard of a strictly fashion social network. I wouldn’t be surprised if i saw Ralph Lauren or Tyson Beckford on there…lol
http://www.Soci...rewryonline.net
Let’s see if this new dot com social network stands firm or crashes…lol
Why is just for women? I am sure there is an intrest for this in men fashion.
Clothing says a lot about you and your personal tastes. Overall these fashion sites say “Only women buy clothes or care about fashion” and that is just not true. In this case I encourage Style Hop to take a look into broadening it’s audienace. It might pay to have independant designers and stylist bloggers offer some sort of insight as well. Just thoughts and speculation.
MissDeals.com provides a similar service.
StyleHop has already won over investors, a VenCorps $50k 1st place showdown award, and a thriving network of college aged women (the target predictive market for what sells in fashion). It’s brilliant that StyleHop is redefining what’s possible with real-time market research by leveraging social networking, wisdom-of-the-crowd trendcasting, and viral interactive entertainment apps (which go beyond “casual games” because they offer real utility to players curious about what’s hot among their peers, how well they know style, and other valuable insights).
If you don’t really get the StyleHop concept then maybe it will make more sense if you think of fashion magazines, men’s magazines, sports magazines, fitness magazines… or any other entertainment product catering to a specific vertical market. Users come because they love fashion as a topic (reading, sharing, learning, talking about it) and the social and gaming features help make the experience sticky and engaging relative to digital fashion mags or plain old blogs.
StyleHop innovates in terms of their business model because unlike most web startups (too many of whom launch with ZERO revenue streams), they have more than 4 potential rev sources: affiliate shopping (you can buy the styles in their games and social network features from direct links), advertising (both on-site and in distributed entertainment apps on other sites, blogs, and soc nets), private studies/market research data for the multi-billion dollar fashion industry (real time market data from key demographics on products that *never before in the history of the fashion industry* had a viable, cost-effective market research option– individual styles are low-margin and have a shelf life of like 16 weeks so traditional market research is totally impractical), and the potential to license or get acquired for their patented IP (see, StyleHop is pioneering something that the games industry has neglected and failed to capitalize on themselves: games are an excellent vehicle to make generating market data fun and cost-effective for all involved).
As for not targeting men fresh out of the gate, I thought that was also a bit stereotypical and old fashioned… but then David explained how women are still the only ones spending real money on fashion. Money talks and it’s probably a small minority of men who buy as many new styles and accessories each season relative to women. As a 29-year old woman I also felt like focusing on college women was near-sighted but as a marketer I know a startup can’t afford to be all things to everyone right from the start. For fashion, it makes sense to start with 18-25 year old women. I’ve no doubt that StyleHop will expand and become inclusive for everyone who loves fashion once they have traction in a key pilot market.
They’re definitely a startup to watch.
(disclosure: I’m very familiar with them because I did some freelance consulting for them)
With the economy being the way it is, more people will go online for a deal, even in the high end fashion segment.