StyleHop

THE PROBLEM
What’s missing in the fashion ecosystem is unbiased consumer advice to help women quickly and confidently shop fashion. Companies in other industry verticals that leverage consumer reviews have found they are a powerful strategic weapon. Consumers habitually click on these sites for honest advice (Restaurants – Yelp; Travel – TripAdvisor; Books – Amazon; Consumer Electronics – CNET). In fashion, though, no company has figured out how to generate the large numbers of consumer reviews or rankings required of a large scale consumer review destination. Quite simply, no company has been successful convincing women to consistently review fashion because there are so many styles, they have such short lives and each style addresses a relatively narrow consumer segment.

THE SOLUTION
StyleHop has come up with a creative solution to this problem: online games. StyleHop is creating fun, addictive, lightweight social games and quizzes that allow women to participate socially in something they already love: fashion and shopping. Most importantly, our games all revolve around current fashion available for sale online and they all prompt women to provide a five-star ranking for each style presented. Playing StyleHop games will create the star ranking data that feeds StyleHop’s shopping review site and helps consumers shop styles based on the product rankings of people just like them.

We are creating the first fashion shopping site that is filterable not only by brand and product attributes but also by who you want providing your five-star rankings. For example, a University of Michigan sophomore could see the top party tops as ranked by Michigan students, the top outfits ranked by 25-year old Manhattan women since she is doing a summer internship in New York, and the best club tops ranked by Miami women since she will be going there with friends later in the month.

StyleHop’s consumer model will give us very low-cost access to highly screened, predictive fashion consumers. This access will allow us to sell fashion companies wisdom-of-crowd demand forecasting and help add significant dollars, currently lost through markdowns, to the bottom line. Today fashion companies rely almost exclusively on individual merchants to determine which styles to produce and in which quantities. Merchants’ ability to predict consumer needs accurately has the single greatest impact on the profitability of an apparel line. It is their inconsistent qualitative judgments that contribute to the wildly erratic financial results prevalent throughout the industry.