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

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!

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)

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.

http://www.Soci...rewryonline.net

Azeem

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.

Nat
http://www.workersinc.com

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.