California Apparel News

Innovative shopping websites are becoming the new frontier in retailing. That is illustrated by StyleSpot, a website adding a new spin to online retailing by merging the worlds of fashion editorial and shopping.

“The macro picture of what we’re trying to do is replicate the curation that print magazines have traditionally provided for the fashion industry—but doing it online in interactive media,” said Rafi Gordon, co-founder and co–chief executive of the website.

StyleSpot creates content that includes fashion trends, designer spotlights and hot celebrity looks and connects them to product recommendations and shopping opportunities with more than 300 retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Shopbop and Zappos.

More than 1 million products are available, ranging from apparel and accessories to handbags, shoes and beauty products. Daily email blasts and newsletters highlight the information and provide shopping links and personalized sales recommendations. “We’re basically trying to blend the worlds of fashion content and shopping in a way that you could never do in print but you can online,” Gordon explained.

In addition, StyleSpot distributes its content and e-commerce links to publishers wanting celebrity and style content and a new, non-advertising revenue stream. Themed product galleries are featured on publication sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and BlackBook Magazine, with links back to StyleSpot’s shopping engine. Revving upStyleSpot was founded by Internet entrepreneurs and longtime friends Gordon and partner Alex Amin. Previously, the pair created a leading entertainment-industry database now known as Baseline Research, which was purchased by The New York Times in 2006.

StyleSpot was launched in a beta version in 2009 and officially rolled out in June 2010. The original idea for StyleSpot was inspired by the founders observing their wives’ shopping patterns. “We noticed that they were looking through a lot of fashion magazines and celebrity magazines, and then they were going online and trying to find the [products] that they were seeing in the magazines,” Gordon said. “And a lightbulb went off. It just occurred to us that even though we ourselves weren’t fashion fanatics, we were capable of putting together a very massive shopping engine where we could link all of those products.”

Late last year, Gordon and Amin brought in a mutual friend, Judd Zinberg, who has played a key role in developing public relations and marketing and establishing the company’s social-media strategy. An influx of seed capital from Idealab in Pasadena, Calif., earlier this year helped accelerate growth.

The biggest challenge in creating StyleSpot was building its massive shopping engine. It took a year and a half to create the engine, which ingests product feeds from every retail partner and layers editorial content with product recommendations for consumers. Part of the challenge was standardizing product content so images, categories and descriptions—including colors, sizes and styles—would be consistent.

Online apparel sales is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the digital world. In 2010, online apparel sales totaled more than $30 billion, and it’s been growing at a 15 percent to 20 percent rate per year. Potentially, over the next 10 years, online sales could surpass bricks-and-mortar apparel sales.

“So, there’s a lot of inherent growth opportunity just by staying focused on what we’re doing, which is driving great recommendations to people in terms of style and then sending them to the places to buy it online,” Amin said.

So far, the idea seems to be a success. The company projects $1 million in sales through its retail partners by the end of this year.

StyleSpot utilizes social-media outlets Facebook and Twitter, with StyleSpot’s combined 400,000 followers, to help drive traffic to the site. It also aggregates its audience through two free email subscription products. A daily newsletter email features a designer, a trend or a celebrity along with product recommendations and links to its retail partners.

The second subscription is a personalized daily sales email called MyStyleSpot. More than 1,000 subscribers a day are signing up for the email, which provides customized sales information. Subscribers specify their interests, such as their favorite brand or product category, and every night StyleSpot searches the database and offers those products when they go on sale. The email provides real value to the consumer as it filters all the product offerings in StyleSpot’s massive online shopping universe, creating a personalized selection every day. “It’s just something that a person wouldn’t be able to do,” Amin said. “You can’t get up in the morning and go to your 20 favorite shopping sites—Zappos, Shopbop, Neiman Marcus—and look for every product that’s on sale.”

Over time, the sales alert will automatically adjust, based on a person’s shopping habits or browsing patterns.

With a strong foundation in place, the focus for the future is growth. “We feel like we’ve built a model that’s proving that it’s working really well, and now it’s just about scaling it and making it bigger,” Gordon said. Plans include adding more retailers and subscribers and expanding the breadth and depth of the content.

In addition, they hope to get even smarter about personalized recommendations. “I think where we’re going to be really innovative is with the personalizations,” Gordon said. “Being able to really see what sites you visit, what types of products you click on, really getting sophisticated about that. I think that’s one of the big trends you’re going to see from us. Internet-wide, I think it’s going to be a big theme.”