Polyvore.com

I was ecstatic to see Claire Cain Miller’s article on Polyvore in the New York Times. Polyvore is fashion social sharing site that allows its users to create their own outfits from clothing, accessories and shoes that they find online. Think user-generated/created fashion advertisements.

Founded by three ex-Yahoo engineers, Polyvore, has been focused on getting people to visit the site. It seems to be working. In June, Polyvore had more than 835,000 unique visitors, almost 25 percent more than the traffic to Style.com, run by Vogue, and InStyle.com, according to Compete, a Web analytics firm. It is also far bigger than the Web sites of Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar. While other fashion magazine sites have been struggling to hold an online audience, Polyvore has tripled its traffic in the last year. Its 928,000 registered users create 28,000 new sets a day.

Polyvore is succeeding where fashion magazines’ digital versions are failing. They are capturing and retaining their users by allowing them to choose the brands and retailers they want to interact with. And while those users can interact and create sets with the brands they know; they are being exposed to new ones by visiting the sets their friends create.

What Polyvore Means For Retailers

Polyvore allows brands and retailers to connect with current and new customers online.

Polyvore offers high user engagement with brands & products. I view the sets created by Polyvore’s users as a form of viral brand advertising. It’s real people endorsing real products and merchandising them in their own unique, creative layouts. They share these layouts with friends on and off Polyvore by embedding them on their blogs and posting them to their Facebook & Twitter accounts. It is a viral, grassroots advertising campaign for products, created entirely by users. And it’s also cost effective.

Polyvore helps make e-commerce sites more social.

Though 95 percent of the images on Polyvore come from users, Polyvore allows brands and retailers to create a product feed and upload all their products directly to the site. The feed creates direct links to the products, their information and their pricing.

Polyvore also allows online retailers to license their technology to use on their own sites. Currently, Charlotte Russe and Torrid have integrated Polyvore’s technology into their websites to create their own digital style/ look books. The technology is extremely versatile and easy to use. Daily maintenance can be handled by the website owner, marketing director or online retail merchandiser (providing consistency and better adaptability to changes in online consumer trends/buying); it doesn’t require a full-time e-commerce developer to manage.

Polyvore provides cost effective online marketing programs. Polyvore allows fashion companies to sponsor content on the site.  According to Miller, retailer “Tory Burch promoted its summer collection, which was inspired by Venice, by running a contest on Polyvore that asked users to create Venetian-themed sets using the new Tory Burch pieces.”

Polyvore also offers it’s own pay-per-click program for e-commerce sites.

Polyvore’s PPC program is very similar to Google Adwords, where retailers pay a fixed amount per click for items that appear on the right hand side of page. Lori’s Shoes’ Creative Director was correct when he stated “[Polyvore] gets us a better customer than banner ads or cost-per-click ads, they’re just instantly more loyal.”

As the Director of Online Marketing for 1928 Jewelry, I was one of the first online retailers to test market Polyvore’s PPC program. I must say, I was extremely impressed. During the six months we utilized Polyvore, there were over 4276 outfit combinations created using 1928 products. While the conversion rate was only about 1%, a Polyvore user’s order size was 15% higher than that of an average 1928 Jewelry site user. Once we integrated the Polyvore sharing buttons and implemented a direct product feed, site traffic jumped 640% and Polyvore became our #1 referrer of traffic. – Macala Wright Lee

Polyvore sets offer real time trending information.

Polyvore also plans to sell data on customer preferences it compiles on the site. It could potentially tell a retailer that a type of shoe is more popular in Manhattan than Los Angeles, so it would know where to stock the shoe. Or designers could upload images of new items before deciding to produce them, in order to get input from fashion-savvy users.

“It could also give buyers information about trends in real-time, faster than monthly magazines,” said Jess Lee, Polyvore’s product manager. “This fall, for example, watch for recent trends bubbling up on the site: exposed zippers, fingerless gloves and butterfly prints.”

Polyvore is an online marketer’s dream when it comes to building blogger and brand relationships.

Fashion, lifestyle and personal bloggers use Polyvore to create professional, magazine-like spreads using real products for their blogs. Whether they’re blogging about celebrity style or highlighting their favorite pair of shoes, Polyvore makes the creation process simple. Stylists and wardrobe consultants also use Polyvore as a tool to create outfits with real products for clients, and use their Polyvore profile as a portfolio.  Talk about having the Golden Ticket! Why wouldn’t a marketing firm use Polyvore to track which users are utilizing their client’ products for sets and posting them to their blog on a continued basis? It shows brand loyalty, content relevance and identifies a potential brand ambassador with an audience that brand can leverage.

Shortly after Cain’s article LadyLux.com reported that Polyvore received a second round of VC funding:

“They successfully raised $5.6 million in necessary capital, which will ensure this relatively new site to continue on with their greatness! With this newly secured funding, also comes a new investor, Matrix Partners. Still only a six-person team, they plan to hire even more engineers and sales people to help take Polyvore to a more profitable level with creative ad campaigns made for users by users!” -  LadyLux.com