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Weardrobe

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Kprincisvalle (talk | contribs) at 04:20, 4 October 2011 (Filling in 12 references using Reflinks). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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 a Microsoft 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. [1] 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. Weardrobe was invited to participate in Facebook's Summer Incubator Program in Palo Alto, California.[2] There, Xie and Tong worked on integrating Facebook Connect to the online fashion network so users could see who of their friends are on the site and include those friends' activity through Facebook news feeds.[3]

The founders also made a partnership with Urban Outfitters whereby the company sends clothing out to specific Weardrobe users. The Weardrobe community individuals then post images of the items styled to their preference and then send the clothing back to the company.[4]

On November 18, 2009, the community was acquired by Like.com.[5] 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.[6] Subsequently, Like.com was acquired by Google on August 20th, 2010 for a rumored price of $100,000. [7] The reasoning is said to be for the strength of visual search within the database of Like.com, which now supports Boutiques.com.[8]

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 by tagging clothing in the images that they upload to the site and translating those articles into color-coded items for organizational purposes.[9]

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|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.[6]

Community

On occasion, the site sponsors contests in which members submit photographs of outfits based on given themes. Sometimes, Weardrobe pairs up with other fashion-related sites such as Modcloth and Market Publique - both online vintage American retailers - to offer different prizes for winning. Weardrobe's 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.[10] Their collaboration with Market Publique, Time After Time, asked for vintage-inspired outfit entries and the winner was flown into Brooklyn for a photo shoot session with Market Publique.[11] Modcloth also held another competition whereby they supplied the New York City Weardrobe community with a vintage black Modcloth dress (called the "Weardrobe Dress") and asked the community to come up with a way to style it.[12][13] The dress was a simple black garment, and contestants submitted photos of how they would style an outfit using this "Weardrobe Dress." In its collaboration with other fashion focused sites, Weardrobe provides a platform where people interested in fashion come together and demonstrate their skill. It also provides an outlet for fashion-related sites to show off their clothing items to a specified online community niche that is interested in clothing and fashion.

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.[14] There, the bloggers participated in a DIY (Do It Yourself) exercise in customizing a pair of Solana Extreme Skinny Jeans,[15] which were voted the #1 Jean of the Summer by Seventeen Magazine for 2009.[16] 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.[14]

There are other sites with similar features and goals to Weardrobe. Weardrobe contributors are sometimes also contributors on Chictopia or Lookbook (another similar website similar to the ones already mentioned is Closet Couture [17]).[18] While these sites are similar in nature the strength and difference of Weardrobe lies in the fact that it is reliant upon feedback from friends and not fashion magazines. Weardrobe is meant to be an open source of style. Chictopia and Lookbook (like Weardrobe) offer "the common fashionista" the ability to publicly post their looks to an online community of people interested in fashion. [19][20] The sites also contain photo blogs and competitions for online contributors.[21][22][23]

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,[24] 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.[25] 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.[26]

References

  1. ^ a b "How 20 Business Ideas Were Hatched". Bloomberg Businessweek.
  2. ^ "Facebook Announces 2009 fbFund Winners". Inside Facebook.
  3. ^ "A Visit to fbFund REV: Weardrobe and Networked Blogs on Fashion and Blogging". Inside Facebook.
  4. ^ "The Way They Wore It". Urban Outfitters.
  5. ^ "Like.com Acquires Street Style Fashion Community Weardrobe". TechCrunch.
  6. ^ a b "Street Style for Sale: Like.com and Weardrobe Sell Blogger's Looks". Switched.
  7. ^ "It's Official: Google Acquires Like.com". TechCrunch.
  8. ^ "Google Rocks Fashion, Personalized Shopping, And Like's Visual Search With Boutiques.com". TechCrunch.
  9. ^ "Weardrobe out to be the Shelfari of Fashion". Mashable.
  10. ^ "The Style Mavens on Our Mod Honor Roll". Modcloth.
  11. ^ "LOOKBOOK - BROOKLYN BAYOU - FEATURING WEARDROBE CONTEST WINNER RACHEL OF STUDIO SWAG!". Market Publique.
  12. ^ "Your 'Weardrobe' Essential – the LBD". Modcloth.
  13. ^ "ModCloth Blog » Blog Archive » Your 'Weardrobe' Essential – the LBD". Blog.modcloth.com. 2009-10-23. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  14. ^ a b "Fashion Bloggers Converge for Inaugural Conference in NYC - Trade Talk". Apparelnews.net. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  15. ^ "Weardrobe.com Features DIY Bullhead Denim | PacSun Community". Community.psunserv.net. 2009-09-22. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  16. ^ "Voted BEST Skinny Jean by Seventeen Magazine Readers | PacSun Community". Community.psunserv.net. 2009-08-12. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  17. ^ "Weardrobe - Competitors". Venturebeatprofiles.com. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  18. ^ "American Apparel Accessories, Dirty Violet From Urban Outfitters Shirts, Americs | "so not me pt. 1" by calivintage". Chictopia. 2009-05-29. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  19. ^ "collective fashion consciousness". Lookbook.Nu. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  20. ^ "The People's Fashion Destination". Chictopia. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  21. ^ "collective fashion consciousness". Lookbook.Nu. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  22. ^ "The People's Fashion Destination". Chictopia. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  23. ^ "Weardrobe.com - Organize and Share Your Wardrobe | Visit weardrobe.com". Killerstartups.com. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  24. ^ Kristen Philipkoski (2011-01-18). "Google Fashion: Once an Oxymoron, Now a Truism". Stylenik.com. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  25. ^ "Getting to Know You: Jessica Schroeder of What I Wore « Maggie Rose". Maggieroseonline.com. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  26. ^ Name * (2011-07-15). "Style Scene: Cooking Up Style With Jessica Quirk". Seattleite. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
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