Will this catch on? Or is this ‘Commerce’ at the expense of ‘Social?.’
By Lydia Dishman @LydiaBreakfast for Fast Company
Anna Wintour’s influence over the fashion universe is a snip less formidable today. StyleOwner, an e-commerce site that heavily features social selling, just launched in open beta.
Like Google’s Boutiques.com, StyleOwner gives bloggers, fashionistas and Rachel Zoe-wannabes the ability to create their own virtual storefront (for free) and stock it with items from over 2,000 brands carried by retail partners such as Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. As incentive to the seller to leverage their social network, anything purchased in their virtual marketplace earns them a 10 percent commission.
Only 10 percent of the $275 billion of apparel and accessories sold in 2010 were purchased online, according to Sucharita Mulpuru at Forrester Research. However, StyleOwner’s founder and CEO Joel Weingarten tells Fast Company that e-commerce is growing by about 20+ percent annually. “We are helping accelerate that growth,” says Weingarten, by creating a personalized, social and collaborative shopping experience.
Personal curation may just be one of the most over-used term in fashion industry parlance, but one of StyleOwner’s investors, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, still sees it as a huge selling point in the evolution of retail. Specifically, Green says, “StyleOwner leverages this trend by empowering a whole new constituency to act as a sales force for both retailers and brands. A salesperson’s effectiveness is vastly enhanced as credibility is established and access to consumers is increased, these two powerful components are at the heart of peer-to-peer selling and the crux of the StyleOwner model.”
*clever beta-invite/pre-launch marketing above (first 1000 get in).
To establish its fashion cred right from the start, StyleOwner has partnered with such fashion heavyweights as Style.com and more than 30 well-known fashion bloggers including Leandra Medine of Man Repeller, Karen Blanchard of Where Did U Get That, and Keiko Groves who blogs at Keiko Lynn. Weingarten says these early storefronts will draw on the bloggers’ legions of loyal fans who already click to buy the bloggers’ featured looks via affiliate programs.
This is where StyleOwner’s secret sauce, ie: its backend architecture comes in. Weingarten maintains that affiliate programs always take the customer away from the site. “Affiliate programs are cumbersome and unrealistic, [they are] an anathema for a media platform,” that strives to keep the user on its site he says. At StyleOwner, the customer stays within the same shop and checks out once, even if they are buying multiple brands from a variety of retailers.
But Weingarten emphasizes that StyleOwner isn’t just relying on established tastemakers to sell apparel and accessories. By letting average fashionistas become advocates, “They can live their dream of fashion and become full-fledged entrepreneurs,” he says.
