Professional women still want to rock the trends — but don’t want to add to an already overflowing closet.
E-commerce entrepreneurs like Mary Wu (pictured) are experimenting with a new model, a “Netflix for clothing.” Rather than buying a new dress, why not rent one and return it when it’s no longer in style?
For $25 a month, Wu will send you a monthly “box” filled with clothing from stores like Zara and H&M. Boxes can be ordered on the website CoutureSQD by theme, such as professional or date night. Each box contains three outfits, which you can keep for as long as you want.
“I follow trends and see what’s popular,” said Wu, who developed the website on her own. “A lot of women are like me in that they wear 20 percent of their clothing, 80 percent of the time.”
Wu’s customers will get the satisfaction of wearing a new outfit, but won’t slide into debt. The website just launched, so only about 100 women have signed up, but Wu is confident about her chances with the twenty and thirtysomething professional set.
Websites like RentTheRunway.com are already well-established among young professionals who can’t afford to buy a designer dress, but are willing to fork over about $100 for a one-off rental. CoutureSQD works differently as it’s a subscription service, and specializes in lower-end trendy apparel for everyday use.
This subscription model is tried and tested when it comes to other areas of fashion; Rocksbox focuses on high-end jewelry, Shoedazzle focuses on designer shoes, and TieTry lets people rent fancy ties by mail.
Similarly to these sites, when you want to return the items, CoutureSQD will send a prepaid shipping label by email. The company covers the cost of dry-cleaning, so you won’t need to run the clothes through the wash. If you happen to like an item of clothing and want to keep it, Wu will sell it to you at a discounted price.
The site is still in the early-stages of development, but Wu has identified a strong pain-point. In the coming months, she hopes to recruit additional team-members, and procure a round of angel funding.
“The whole purpose of this is to help women mix and match, and try fashion at a lower-risk,” said Wu.
Would you use a subscription clothing service like this one? Let us know in the comment section below.
If you didn’t see a wide open market for custom T-shirts, I wouldn’t fault you.
But a startup called Teespring is generating a huge buzz at Y Combinator’s demo day. The company presented today to a roomful of investors and press, and announced that it pulled in $750,000 in revenues in a single month.
“We turn affinity into money,” said founder Walker Williams. The company has tapped into niche communities on social sites like Facebook or Reddit. For instance, a Facebook page with several thousand “likes” for dedicated fans of “big trucks and bonfires” might want to offer its community a custom T-shirt.
The company hopes its sales will eclipse chief competitor Threadless by the end of the year. Developer groups like Node.js and Hacker News are already customers, and the company intends to boost sales by lining up celebrity spokespeople.
As we reported earlier this month, Teespring was started at Brown University when the campus community reacted to a police raid at a local bar. The founders realized that a T-shirt would bring students together in a common cause.
The company has a unique model that caters to amateur marketers and merchandisers. A community group creates a T-shirt, uploads it to the Teespring website, and then hosts an embedded sales page on its own site. If enough are ordered, the shirt goes into production.
I was introduced to Teespring through Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, who also serves as an advisor to Y Combinator’s startups on the East Coast. Ohanian said he’s a “huge fan” as it makes merchandising easier for startups and community groups.
“[Merchandising is] a huge pain for lots of reasons, and they’ve brilliantly solved it by making a solution that’s both economical and high-quality,” said Ohanian.
Over the last decade, the rise of mobile technology and the maturation of the Web as distribution and consumption channels has had a devastating effect on the music industry, among others. Yet, on the bright side, more recently these technologies have produced a litany of new ways to discover great music, empowering both fans and musicians in the process. While it seems that each day brings a new music app or product — a net positive for music fans — there’s also a lot of noise.
Many of these apps and music services are exploring the social side of music discovery, allowing users to find, download and listen to their friends’ favorite music fare. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and others have capitalized on the launch of Facebook Music, for example, which introduced millions of Facebook users to the experience of viewing their friend’s listening activity (and sharing their own) in realtime.
While music discovery via your friends and social graph has a lot of appeal conceptually, initially, it just added to the noise problem rather than channeling it. Social music experiences were exciting more as a novelty, seeming to provide more value as a feature or a layer, than as the core around which a successful music service could be built. Luckily, EQuala wants change that by giving users more control over the social music discovery experience — and the noise.
ListnPlay’s free Android and iOS app looks to go that extra distance toward creating a social radio station on the Web that you’ll actually want to use by giving users with their own social “equalizer,” and allowing them to create (and more importantly) curate and customize their social music streams. Launching today in the U.S. with over 23 million tunes in its catalog (and growing), EQuala allows music fans wants to help evolve the Facebook-integrated music experience, letting users create personalized streams from songs their friends are listening to and from those with similar music tastes.
After logging in through Facebook, EQuala developers comprehensive taste profiles based on the music you’ve listened to (and shared) through third-party services like Spotify, YouTube and Songza, among others. To decide whether or not your friends’ playlist is worthy of your standards, users can click on any friend in their search results to see what they’ve been listening to on these services and populate their social radio stream accordingly, listening to and sharing these friend-approved songs as they go.
While the experience itself is different from other familiar services, that’s still fairly standard to the social music discovery experience. The real key (and its ace in the hole) is what EQuala does after that. Using its “Friends EQualizer,” users can then customize and control their music stream, managing whose music plays more frequently, for example. The app allows you to see each selected friend on a sliding scale (or equalizer), adjusting those controls based on how much influence you want a particular friend to have in your stream.
Once customized, users can then click play to enjoy or at any time, delete friends from the list if and when they decide to go through a Creed phase. The app also enables users to communicate with one another through “love,” “shout,” and “re-shout” buttons, which send push notifications to alert you via your phone and allow you to quickly share tracks on social media.
Not unlike Pandora (and Echo Nest), EQuala’s tech gives each users his or her own “Music DNA,” which is essentially a breakdown of the genres and types of music you listen to the most — along with data integrated from your “shouts” and “loves,” etc. The more you listen, EQuala personalizes your music DNA and is able to more accurately match users with those in their network who share similar tastes. The app also shows a percentage match between one user and another to give users a sense of the degree of similarity.
The other selling point is that EQuala allows you to consume your friends’ music selections even if they’re not using the platform. As long as music is being shared (through Facebook), EQuala will let you tailor your social radio stream.
Based on early testing, EQuala stands up pretty well, giving much more social context to your daily music consumption. It also does a pretty good job of removing friction that stands in the way of getting music playing instantly, offers a sizable catalog at launch (which is impressive in and of itself) and by allowing you to add, delete and curate your friend-informed playlist and adjust influence, wins some value points.
If you’re open to the idea of social music discovery but haven’t found the right experience yet, EQuala may be what you’re looking for, giving you control over your social stream and finally putting the power to curate and customize social back into your hands.
For more, find EQuala at home here and on the App Store here.
As promised last month, LearnVest, a startup which recently expanded its focus from teaching women to become more financially savvy to teaching entire households to so, is now available on mobile. Today, the company is officially debuting its iOS application in the App Store, which will allow users to sign up, budget, set goals, track their cash flow and more.
It’s good to see that LearnVest’s mobile app has been designed with the idea that this may be some people’s first encounter with the service. There are other apps in the financial space that treat their mobile counterparts as complements to their existing service, offering merely a reflection of data already entered in on the web. But with LearnVest, you can sign up from the app itself, and then use the included search feature to find your bank or banks, and add your accounts. For safety’s sake, users are also prompted to set a PIN code to lock down the app – and the PIN code lock screen even has an easy-access button allowing you to quickly add a cash transaction.
The app’s user interface is straightforward, clean, and very mobile-friendly. Two large buttons appear when you first log in – one which takes you to LearnVest’s “Money Center,” and the other which takes you to LearnVest’s articles, which is its advice and how-to’s resource.
After adding accounts, you can then set up your “Smart Budget.” The service automatically tracks and categorizes your spending, so you have a realistic picture of where your money is going. If you’re really watching the nickels and dimes, that’s where the “add a cash transaction” option comes in. Instead of waiting for bank accounts to sync, you can manually enter an item to keep your cash flow balance on track.
While LearnVest categorizes most transactions for you, the 5%-10% which are left uncategorized can be moved into the appropriate section with a tap. These uncategorized transactions are also cached, so you can organize them when you’re offline, too.
Goal-setting is another app feature which again demonstrates the mobile app’s potential to be used as its own standalone interface for accessing and using this service. Here, the app shows your current progress in dynamic graphs and you can even adjust your goals on the fly.
LearnVest, originally a TechCrunch50 startup, has come a long way since its 2009 debut. Last month, the company reported having “helped” over a million users, but this includes account holders, financial newsletter subscribers, and those attending its online, educational “bootcamp” programs. Following its $19 million Series C from Accel and others last July, the company has now raised $24.5 million in funding.
The service just underwent a major overhaul – its largest ever, bringing a new online dashboard, new paid plans, access to investment advice, and more. To some extent, the company is a competitor with personal financial services like Mint, but LearnVest doesn’t monetize using its customers’ data to recommend products. “It’s all about being unbiased, trusted, just about your money and your best goals and plans of action,” LearnVest CEO Alexa Von Tobel told us in September. But more than that, LearnVest actually pairs its users to work with a financial planner, who are there to help customers reach their goals.
Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay. Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site.
Ohtootay was founded by Mark Otuteye, and yes – that’s where it got its name. Mark is a former Googler and the CEO of AES Connect, which has been in the consulting business since 2007. The company helped a number of major brands with their Facebook applications, including some notable examples which he can’t talk about on the record. A few AES clients have included Sephora, Coldwell Banker and Nickelodeon, however. It’s from his company’s experience in the social media space that the idea for Ohtootay got its start: it was built in response to what AES’s customer base needed.
One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says.
Another key differentiator between Ohtootay’s solution and others is a feature that lets marketers track Pinterest pins all the way through to website conversions and associated sales. This works even when a client shares a pin that doesn’t point to their own e-commerce site, and it’s likely to be the biggest selling point for this platform. Mark explains that other social analytics companies do something called “last-click” attribution.
“That is, they can say ‘Pinterest caused this sale’ only when a sale happens immediately after you click a Pinterest pin that points to their own website. That’s OK for impulse buys that happen in one click, but it’s not good enough for enterprise sales in which customers do weeks of research (much of it on other sites) before making a purchase,” he says. “What if a customer clicks on your pin that points to a relevant infographic not on your own site, later Googles you, and then decides to buy? Other analytics software will mistakenly tell social media managers that ‘Google’ caused this sale even though the customer’s first contact was through content you curated on your Pinterest boards.”
This last-click bias is a problem that over-exaggerates Google’s importance, and under-reports the role social media played in generating that sale. It’s something marketers have been after for some time, but haven’t yet been able to do because of the way social media sites are structured. To make this work, Ohtootay generates custom URLs (a company can use their preferred URL shortener as well), and then uses cookies to track the user. When that user arrives on the company’s e-commerce site, custom code embedded there will tell Ohtootay when a conversion actually happens.
Ohtootay has been operating in private beta with about a dozen testers for the past three months, but is today available to all. There’s a 30-day free trial, and then a $399/month/user charge. Going forward, Mark says the next addition will be an option that lets marketers track their profitability by allowing them to add their social media budgets to the platform. That will show them not just the dollar amounts of sales, but what it took to get there.
San Francisco-based Ohtootay is currently a bootstrapped team of ten. Sign up is here.
