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Weardrobe
Type of site
Street fashion community
Available inEnglish
OwnerLike.com
Created bySuzanne Xie and Rich Tong
URLhttp://www.weardrobe.com/

Weardrobe is an online street fashion community designed to encourage networking between both novice and established bloggers, as well as to allow members to share outfits and comment on others' photographs.

History

The idea for the community originated in an University of Chicago dorm room in September 2004, where Weardrobe co-founder Suzanne Xie kept track of everything she had in her closet via an Excel spreadsheet. In late 2007, she, along with friend and co-founder Rich Tong, noted that there was no application to organize clothing online and began discussing the possibility of developing such a forum.[2] Their discussions spawned the basis for Weardrobe, and the site officially went online in January 2008.

In 2009, Weardrobe was named one of 20 winners of Facebook's fbFund competition for startups and nonprofit companies and was invited to participate in their Summer Incubator Program in Palo Alto, California.[3] There, Xie and Tong worked on integrating Facebook Connect to the fashion network so users could see who of their friends are on the site, and to include them in their activity through the Facebook news feed. [4] The founders were also able to make a partnership with Urban Outfitters where the company sends clothing out to specific users, they post images of the items styled to their preference, and then send the clothing back to the company. [5]

On November 18, 2009, the community was acquired by Like.com.[6] Accordingly, the site has undergone several changes, including the addition of search functionality that allows readers to find and purchase similar articles of clothing if they so desire.[7] Subsequently, Like.com was aquired by Google on August 20th, 2010 for a rumored price of $100,000. [8] The reasoning is said to be for the strength of visual search within the database of Like.com, which now supports Boutique.com. [9]

Features

As a street fashion community, Weardrobe provides members with the opportunity to create their own user profiles and post photographs of themselves. Users also have the ability to comment on others' photographs and send messages to each other, increasing the site's networking functionality. Furthermore, members can create and view a virtual representation of their real-life closet, taking the images that they upload to the site and translating individual articles of clothing into color-coded items for organizational purposes.[10]

One of the site's most recently added features is an extension of Likesense (Like.com's visual search capabilities). It aesthetically identifies items in a given outfit photograph, culls similar ones from one of Like.com's 5000 suppliers, and then displays the results to the user with the option for them to purchase those articles. This allows people to easily buy replicas of clothing that they see and like in the site's photographs, even though the piece in the outfit might have originally been a vintage one-of-a-kind. Likesense first displays two items, and if one of the two is clicked, further variations on that piece of clothing are shown. Currently, it only runs this process on the front page, which displays daily featured looks; however, there are plans to expand so that the entire site will eventually be searchable with Like.com.[11]

Community

Users of the website are sometimes also contributors on Chictopia or Lookbook[12], which are websites similar to Weardrobe, but the strength of the site is reliant upon feedback from friends and not fashion magazines. The site is meant to be an open source of style. [13] (Another similar website is Closet Couture.[14])

On occasion, the site sponsors contests in which members submit photographs of outfits based on given themes. Sometimes the competitions are in-house, such as "In the Trenches", where the member with the best look featuring a trench coat received $100 to Anthropologie[15]. Other times, Weardrobe pairs up with other fashion-related sites such as Modcloth and Market Publique to offer different prizes for winning. Their collaboration with Modcloth, the Mod Honor Roll Contest, asked for members' favorite back-to-school inspired outfits; the prize for the top three submissions included a special Modcloth outfit that the bloggers then styled and modeled.[16] Their collaboration with Market Publique, Time After Time, asked for vintage-inspired outfit entries and the winner was flown into Brooklyn for a photoshoot session with Market Publique.[17]

In early September of 2009, Weardrobe sponsored a conference in New York City for 19 popular fashion bloggers - many of whom have been featured in Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, and Lucky Magazine, and whose sites collectively receive 5 million page views a month.[18] There, the bloggers participated in a DIY (Do It Yourself) exercise in customizing a pair of Solana Extreme Skinny Jeans[19], which were voted the #1 Jean of the Summer by Seventeen Magazine for 2009.[20] The conference was meant to create a space for some of the fashion industry's most active style bloggers (including the minds behind the sites Style Rookie, Kansas Couture, Fashion Pirates, Calivintage, and Fashion is Poison) to collaborate and exchange ideas about fashion and their styles.[21]

Notable Members

Weardrobe has previously been known to hire staff from among their notable members, including Krystal Bick from This Time Tomorrow, who acted as the site's community manager[22], and Jessica Quirk of the blog What I Wore, who served as community director and also did some creative work, including writing and illustrating weekly contest images[23]. Since the launch of her online blogging career, Quirk has also written a book entitled What I Wore: Four Seasons, One Closet, Endless Recipes for Personal Style, in which she answers frequently asked style questions, features several of her own favorite outfits and illustrations, and gives tips for organizing a closet.[24]

References

  1. ^ http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_eureka_moments/20.htm
  2. ^ http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_eureka_moments/20.htm
  3. ^ http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/05/28/facebook-announces-19-2009-fbfund-winners/
  4. ^ http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/06/30/a-visit-to-fbfund-rev-weardrobe-and-networked-blogs-on-fashion-and-blogging/
  5. ^ http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/category.jsp?_DARGS=/urban/catalog/common/highlited_itemcount.jsp_A&_DAV=true&itemCount=60&navCount=7&navAction=poppushpush&popId=WOMENS&pushId=WOMENS_WHATSNEW&id=W_COLL_WEARDROBEGATEWAY&090608hp
  6. ^ http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/like-com-acquires-street-style-fashion-community-weardrobe/
  7. ^ http://www.switched.com/2009/11/19/street-style-for-sale-like-com-and-weardrobe-sell-bloggers-loo/
  8. ^ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/20/its-official-google-acquires-like-com/
  9. ^ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/google-boutiques/
  10. ^ http://mashable.com/2008/04/30/weardrobe-out-to-be-the-shelfari-of-fashion/
  11. ^ http://www.switched.com/2009/11/19/street-style-for-sale-like-com-and-weardrobe-sell-bloggers-loo/
  12. ^ http://www.chictopia.com/photo/show/116980-so+not+me+pt+1-american-apparel-accessories-dirty-violet-from-urban-outfitters-shirt-americ
  13. ^ http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/weardrobe-com-organize-and-share-your-wardrobe
  14. ^ http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/weardrobe/competitors
  15. ^ http://www.mystylepill.com/2010/06/my-outfit-in-the-trenches/
  16. ^ http://blog.modcloth.com/2010/09/10/the-style-mavens-on-our-mod-honor-roll/
  17. ^ http://blog.marketpublique.com/content/lookbook-brooklyn-bayou-featuring-weardrobe-contest-winner-rachel-of-studio-swag
  18. ^ http://www.apparelnews.net/blog/383_fashion_bloggers_converge_for_inaugural_conference_in_nyc.html
  19. ^ http://community.psunserv.net/posts/2009/09/22/weardrobecom-features-diy-bullhead-denim
  20. ^ http://community.psunserv.net/posts/2009/08/12/voted-best-skinny-jean-seventeen-magazine-readers?page=1#http://images3.pacsun.com/is/image/pacsun/SeventeenMag_BullheadSolana?$09_comm_main$
  21. ^ http://www.apparelnews.net/blog/383_fashion_bloggers_converge_for_inaugural_conference_in_nyc.html
  22. ^ http://stylenik.com/2011/01/18/google-fashion-once-an-oxymoron-now-a-truism/
  23. ^ http://www.maggieroseonline.com/2009/09/01/getting-to-know-you-jessica-schroeder-of-what-i-wore/
  24. ^ http://www.seattleite.com/cooking-up-style-with-jessica-quirk/
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