Fashion 2.0 | StyleHop's fantasy fashion

Watch out buyers, editors and merchants.  StyleHop, one of a new breed of Internet start-ups, is attempting to disintermediate you.  Or, at least, StyleHop is trying to make your job easier.

According to President David Reinke, a business school classmate of ours, women are craving an honest, accurate, democratic rating system in fashion that can help them cut through the clutter and show them highly-filtered lists based on individual preferences.

Customers, he says, know that the editorial pages of fashion magazines are biased by a need to please advertisers and other external influences. So, they would prefer to turn to the wisdom of crowds (i.e. masses of other people just like them) to help them pick out the best styles.

In addition, StyleHop asserts that fashion companies need a more quantitative way to supplement the intuitive decisions made by buyers and merchants on which products to buy and in what quantities. This has always been a bit of a mysterious process, with certain merchants being able to divine the future, using a combination of experience, gut instinct and sometimes, data. Stylehop's MarginFeeder (TM) tool will change all of this and support their decision-making processes with real data and consumer feedback.

However, StyleHop sceptics may suggest that fashion moves too fast and styles change too quickly for this kind of customer feedback  to add any real value. Others may say that the role of designers, editors and buyers is to move consumers in new directions, not just give them what they already want. We sat down with David to address these and other issues to get the first scoop on StyleHop.

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BoF: Why does the fashion world need StyleHop?

In a recent study by Forrester Research, 5000 online consumers were asked what they looked for in a site. User ratings and reviews topped the list, with 64% of consumers requesting the function. 80% of consumers say their purchases have been directly influenced by other consumer’s reviews.

People have just come to expect user reviews to help them make decisions in many categories: think Zagat for restaurants; Amazon for books; TripAdvisor for travel; and CNET for electronics. However, even though women want consumer reviews in fashion, they really don’t exist. StyleHop is going to fill that void.

BoF: How do you think this will impact the current fashion cycle and way of working in the future?

Today the fashion industry relies on individual merchants to determine which styles to produce and in which quantities. Aside from the designs themselves, everyone in the business knows that the merchants’ ability to predict consumer needs has the single greatest impact on the profitability of an apparel line. Her qualitative judgment is what makes or breaks a season for most fashion companies. And, unfortunately for consumer fashion today, there just aren’t a whole lot of Mickey Drexler’s left out there.

Once StyleHop becomes good at helping consumers pick fashion, it will be a natural evolution for us to start helping merchants pick fashion, too. From our internal modeling at StyleHop we’ve found that helping merchants and buyers move beyond using just gut and instinct to make style-level unit commitments has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars currently lost in markdowns.

BoF: But isn't one of the roles of merchants and buyers to push consumers to try new things?

We are not pretending we can serve the edge of fashion, that's for sure.  However, the vast majority of fashion sold in the US and around the world is derivative.  I agree that editors, buyers and even celebrities play an important role warming consumers up to the latest trends.  What's missing, though, is a counterbalancing feedback mechanism that helps the industry more quickly identify which specific style-level interpretations resonate most with each consumer group. Often times, by the time the apparel companies have figured out what works for their target consumer, the trend is over.  It's a huge waste.  I know firsthand there is broad scepticism in our industry to consumer feedback.  I personally think it's a glaring void in the fashion ecosystem and am building StyleHop to try and fill it.

BoF: How does the Internet figure into your approach?

Before entering the fashion world I worked at Procter & Gamble. We regularly would spend $200,000 for product launch market research that would tell us both the market viability of a product as well as give us an accurate demand forecast. The market research firms in this space had long histories in each product category so they were pretty good at estimating demand using consumer polling.

We’ve never had this in fashion because it cost too much and takes too long. It simply cost more to collect the data than you can make on an individual style – in fashion there are just too many styles with too short of shelf lives to justify sku-level market research.

The internet changes all that. At StyleHop we are building the capability to very quickly and inexpensively bring fashion companies sophisticated analytics and pre-screened predictive consumers to support their style-level forecasting. StyleHop is going to meaningfully help merchants do their jobs. In the future, we expect this will be a tool that all merchants and buyers use to support their demand forecasting activities.

BoF: What is the value proposition as far as the brands are concerned...everyone from young designers to major fashion labels?

We really aren’t sure yet – that’s going to be a work in progress. Our sense is that any apparel brand that wants to get closer to its target audience is going to benefit from our consumer collaboration tools. Of course we aren’t focusing on anything bordering on replenishment since prior sales are the best forecasting tool for those items.

Since we are a venture-funded entity there will be a focus on going where the money is, so to speak. In other words, we will be targeting big, mass apparel brands that serve large markets. However, I’m personally interested in finding ways to effectively serve the up-and-coming market, too. With so little training or pipeline left for merchant development, it would bad for the industry to keep this tool from getting into as many hands as possible. At StyleHop we want to help make the fashion industry much more responsive to consumers. I’m committed to that. 

BoF: What stage are you at in your business development, fundraising and team-building? 

We just started building our website in January and have a long way to go. A lot of what we are doing is typical early-stage development work. We’re meeting with potential investors, interviewing for open positions and building out the key elements of our consumer website. Six months from now I expect everything will shift – we will be focused on marketing the site and bringing our forecasting capabilities directly to fashion companies.

The response from investors has been very encouraging. It’s allowed us to be picky which is a real luxury for a web startup company. As we close out this seed round over the next month or two, we continue to be interested in both individual and institutional investors that really understand the fashion space. They seem to be the ones that intuitively understand the potential of StyleHop’s business model.

If you have more questions for David, please feel free to post them in comments and we will follow-up to learn more.  Images courtesy of StyleHop and Tony Diefell.

© 2008 Copyright Imran Amed - The Business of Fashion

Comments

[Jean Voute Pratt]

Great review. A couple of thoughts: 1. If done correctly, David's venture will succeed. In fact, as a result of some of our own efforts we might have some interesting insights to share with him. (I believe you and my husband Mike share friends in Aman Kapadia) There is, indeed, a desire in women just as David states. However, he shouldn't leave out one big missing point: While women are tired of the forces that currently influence the industry and crowd wisdom has its place, there are so many women who don't know their own personal style (or even a personal sense of self) and are looking for guidance that isn't driven by sales. The wisdom of crowds isn't necessarily right for them (unless al you want to do is conform) Perhaps a dual approach of crowd sourcing and expertise not driven by industry forces would be the best combination. Just a thought. - Jean

[Leo]

Hi, I am a Business major student and I came across this article and find the idea of this business interesting. I am currently looking for an internship and would be willing to contact the company for further informations. I would be very thankful to you if you could forward this to David.
Best Regards and congratulations for the great work on the blog!

[David Reinke]

Jean,

You make some fantastic points. Many women do not know or do not have a clearly developed sense of their own personal style.

And you are also right to suggest that unsegmented crowd sourcing is not going to move fashion forward. If all we did at StyleHop was publish the top-ranked styles from all the ratings of all our users, we would have some very boring lists indeed.

Our goal (and admittedly, it requires a lot of users) is to allow women to use StyleHop to create their own "crowd filters" on our shopping site.

As an example, imagine an 18-year old woman getting ready to go to college at Ohio State in the fall. Let's assume she doesn't have a fully developed sense of her personal style and she is a little anxious about shopping for her school wardrobe. At StyleHop we would like to be able to give her filtered style rankings from women who currently go to Ohio State University. The intention isn't that she'll necessarily buy one of the specific items on the list. Rather, it's that she will be able to shop and buy her school wardrobe more confidantly knowing it's within a range that her new peer group will find both appropriate and trend right.

Now for women who are more confident and may land further down along the trend curve, we expect the site will be used in a different way. They may filter their shopping engine primarily based on users who have specific brand preferences similar to their own or they may only want to see styles that are highly ranked by their friends.

In order for StyleHop to avoid becoming purely a "pop fashion" site we believe that individual users need the ability to completely control both the product filters and ranking filters on our shopping engine. It's the users that define which items they see and who they want ranking their fashion.

We also hope that any expertise on our site comes from users. We fully expect fashion mavens will begin to distinguish themselves with specific expertise and leadership within a particular asthetic range.

I'm very interested in any thoughts or follow-up. This is a great discussion.

David Reinke
dreinke(at)stylehop.com

[David Reinke]

We are very small right now but always interested in adding great talent to StyleHop. Please send CVs to dreinke(at)stylehop.com

[The Business of Fashion]

@David: To Jean's point and apart from your segmentation approach, I think your idea to attract fashion mavens to lend their expertise to the less-fashion-savvy is a good one, and the very type of behaviour that you see in the most successful Web 2.0 communities.

But how do you attract those mavens to something as uncool as a "fashion website," which requires the use of "technology". If you could overcome this, the best advisors could almost become super-users on StyleHop. Have you thought about how to attract them (and keep them coming back) to your site? What's in it for them?

[David Reinke]

Regarding attracting fashion mavens...We think users will not need as much expert help on StyleHop because they can use the crowd filtering tool to replace the less consistent editorial they may have turned to in the past.

At StyleHop we want to define fashion mavens based on their ability to develop a following on our website. This could be because of their ability to pick styles that consistently get ranked highly by their peer group, their on-target comments/feedback on style within the community, etc.

We love the idea that the next great fashion merchants can come from anywhere and we hope to celebrate great style pickers (ie StyleHop game players) that come from unexpected places. StyleHop is really about furthering the democratization of fashion. One of our biggest assets is creating games people can play to get some objective measure of their fashion savvy.

So while I certainly hope to attract true fashionistas to the site, my bigger goal is to expand the fashion universe and become a farm league of sorts for future fashionistas.

[Dahlia]

I'm sorry in pointing out the competition, but to what I gather, your site will be much like StyleHive.com except you'll be able to filter the styles and crowds to your own liking, is this correct?

[LL]

Interesting concept. I think it will appeal to the majority of women who enjoy "safe shopping." Essentially, the review feature grants solo buyers the experience of shopping with a large group of friends; it offers validation. There is, however, a difference between a CNET review on a cell phone and a review for a cocktail dress. It'll be interesting to see if women can offer general enough feedback to help large swaths of women, but yet specific enough to be of real use. Furthermore, can a dress be considered five-stars for all body types?

I do wonder, however, if and how this "democratized" fashion and mavens can coexist on the same site. Mavens are, by definition, VIPs. They don't necessarily want to help out the average Ohio State student. I like the idea of having fashion quizzes to identify those with true blue knowledge. If you can create some type of different access/functionality for them, a way to work your way up to being considered a maven, I think that's the key to attracting and maintaining them. Later on, perhaps sponsor a contest where one maven gets selected to go to Fashion Week and offer a write-up on what she would buy for Retailer X? Or maybe have an Ask A Maven feature or something for unsure purchasers? I also like your idea of certain mavens having a specific following for their personal style, so maybe allow them to publish lookbooks (a la Style.com)?

Good luck to you!

[David Reinke]

To Dahlia.

There are many sites out there like StyleHive trying to make fashion social networking work. I think if you talk to them privately, most will admit it has been a very tough road trying to get traction.

The biggest problem I see is that these sites operate like a bazaar....you don't really know how to shop them and they have lots of classifications of product but very little depth within each classification. It's a real treasure hunt.

While some folks really enjoy the thrill of the chase, we are building a much more straightforward shopping experience. If you want to look at tops, go here and we'll give you straight-forward tools to edit down from the thousands available. How do you want to look at tops? You want to see the top ranked tops in NYC? In the Village? Okay, here you go. As far as I can tell filtered ranking functionality doesn't exist on these other sites.

[David Reinke]

LL - Great comments! Yes - I do think StyleHop will appeal more to women who enjoy "safe shopping" as you suggest. The big question is what percent of women fall in that category. My hunch is well over 90%. Even most fashionistas tend to dress pretty narrowly within a trend range from my own observations. The key to making the site successful will be giving women an individualized experience and creating functionality that quickly allows them to identify the subset of styles that match their preferences.

In my mind, once we scale up, the loyal Barney's shopper and loyal Abercrombie & Fitch shopper will never see each other or even influence each other....because they will both choose not to with their filtering preferences.

Yes, we will have to listen and learn to make sure we accomodate mavens on the site. I think some of your recommendations are great. The only area where I think we may disagree on is whether fashion mavens want to help out others or not. Personally, I think the site has great potential for all the fashionistas out there to extend their personal reach and enhance their personal branding as fashion elite. Of course, there will always be some that turn up their noses....but those folks are pretty far outside our target anyway.

[Caricouture]

Sorry to be a naysayer, but I'm not sure that this concept will work. Peer reviews tend to work best on items that have an objective function - i.e. does this printer print well etc. Style is so subjective that it's really hard to reach consensus on what exactly looks good, which is why people rely on key opinion leaders in the first place.

How will you ensure you aren't merely adding to the clutter and confusion, rather than cutting through it as you hope to do, and where does your "credibility" stem from?

I think Conde Nast's UK site, www.stylefinder.com, aims to do something similar and is quite effective because its editors "referee" public opinion and the site has the status of being from the same media family as Vogue etc.

Also, have you road tested your logo and brand? If I hadn't read the article, I'd have guessed you were a swimwear brand, based on the blue colours and the wave motif. Image is everything in this game!

Just some candid feedback, but I do honestly wish you every success with this venture!!

[David Reinke]

To Caricouture: Thanks for the feedback. We are working on look/feel of site....we know we have some work to do there.

Regarding opinion leaders, I think your question is great...Where does credibility stem from? One of the things that gave me confidence to start this business was a very simple survey I conducted with 100 women online (not scientific by any means, I know). The question I asked was this: If you were on the web shopping for apparel and looking at a specific style, which would you tend to trust more, a review from a major fashion critic or user reviews from other consumers. 90 of the 100 women said they would tend to trust the user reviews more.

That said, managing through the clutter and confusion is a real issue. Our solution is to give users the ability to filter who ranks their styles. Rather than depending on an editor at Vogue, at StyleHop women will be able to see a list of styles highly ranked by people just like them. These people may be similar in age, geography, brand preference, store preference or style rankings. The insight is that regular women are never going to run into the editor at Vogue but they will run into lots of other women like them. By giving women a list of styles that are "pre-approved" by their peer group, StyleHop significantly lowers the fashion risk for a woman buying clothes.

[Vikram Alexei Kansara]

Excellent discussion. For this target, I think it's less about attracting existing fashion mavens - and more about facilitating the emergence of new mavens from within the community by providing a platform for these "emergent editors" to earn status and get noticed for showing off their personal style and brand allegiances.

[Youri Margarine]

There's an article talking about your site on a french blog about fashion, just thought I would share it: http://monbodrapo.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/web-20-au-volant-mode-au-tournant/

[Caricouture]

David - hi again and thanks for taking the time to reply to my earlier post.

Without meaning to be rude, I suppose what I'm really wondering when I mention credibility is whether you personally are passionate about women's fashion and style or whether you are just hopping on a bandwagon here.

[David Reinke]

To Caricouture. Ahhh...I understand now. No rudeness implied. What I am is a passionate business person that has spent my entire working career attempting to understand women and meet their needs with innovative products. I believe to thrive in this business it requires both the business/marketing type and creatives and designers. When you have both and mutual respect, you get magic. Each one by itself can only work for so long. I represent 1/2 of the equation and have a profound respect for the other half and what can be created when the two work together....it's why I'm in this industry. If I was only in it to make money, trust me there are easier ways :)