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Interview with start-up Stylesorter
Founder of Stylesorter Julie Adams
Dresses smelling of cigarette smoke, jumpers with holes in them, wrongly sized shoes, Julie Adams, founder of stylesorter, has seen, but more importantly, has bought it all. But fed up with shopping on Ebay and realising that alternative search websites were few and far between, Julie decided to provide the solution to her own problem. It came in the form of a unique search engine which indeed allows you to search clothes, shoes and accessories according to style, garment type, fabric, brand and colour. Thenextwomen asked Julie how she found the process of launching her own online shopping website and what she has achieved and learned so far from it.
How did you come up with the idea for stylesorter?
“I used to shop for clothes on Ebay a lot and really enjoyed being able to search through so many items to find just the sort of thing that I was looking for. However, I got really fed up with getting items that smelled of cigarette smoke, had holes in or did not turn up at all. I kept looking on the internet for an aggregator of online clothing stores so that I could search in bliss from reputable stores with reliable returns policies. The only ones I could find were on the price comparison sites, like Kelko and they were awful to use, being more designed for finding a fridge or a television than a dress! In the end I decided to have a site built. I thought ‘Hell, if I want it, other women must do too!’ (I’m about to find out if my arrogant negating of that market research was a mistake…!).”
What do you hope to achieve with stylesorter?
“I wanted to provide a site where women could browse clothes that were available to buy online, to find what they really wanted, without having to go to lots of different websites. I thought about how well this works for property websites, like Rightmove. People don’t want to go to every single estate agent website to find a property they like, it’s inconvenient! That’s why sites like Rightmove are so successful. I felt that way about clothing stores. Trying to navigate all the different search criteria and compare an item on one site with something on another site was too difficult. I want to make it easier and fun!”
How are you different from other companies offering similar services to you (i.e. offering online search options for clothes and accessories)?
“There are other sites offering similar search facilities but they tend to have a very limited number of merchants, or the search hasn’t been designed with clothes in mind, so doesn’t work particularly well. The other issue is that a lot of the sites offering this sort of service mix ebay search results with their listings, to make it look as if they have more lines. However, this presents the same problem that I sought to get away from, unreliable deliveries and products. The merchants listing items on our site are reputable companies, ones that you probably already know, with good returns policies. The benefit of this is that you get a more reliable service and if you don’t like an item you can easily send it back and get a refund.”
What was your biggest challenge during the development process and how can other start-ups learn from that?
“The biggest challenge for us was to make the search work with all the different file formats that merchants supply their inventory feeds in.
When we first tried to make this work we found that the results were full of men’s clothes, children’s clothes and even random items like TVs. The large catalogue companies will often just send you everything, they won’t separate it out for you (especially if you are a small, new company), so you have to compensate. In the end, the software we had to develop to deal with the weird and wonderful feeds became quite sophisticated, so this has worked to our benefit as our IP is now much more unique and valuable.
The next big challenge for us will be publicising the site, letting people know about it and encouraging them to try it. We really want to get as much feedback as possible, we don’t want people to be shy about telling us what they really think. This information will then feed into our ongoing development. We’ve provided a link on the site to enable people to do this and really want to encourage people to use it.”
Where do you want your company to be in 5 years?
“In five years I would like to have launched similar sites for men’s clothes and for children and babies. Men are already asking “What about us?” I think because of the way men shop it could work even better for them, but I couldn’t have built the men’s site first, could I? What use would that have been to me!”
What have you learned from launching stylesorter?
- Make sure the people you are working with understand, share and buy into your vision
- Keep everyone in the loop, too much information is far better than too little
- Schedule regular meetings and stick to them, especially if you are not all working in the same office, many things are solved face-to-face which seem impossible by email or phone
- Most importantly PERSEVERE! It might seem like you are never going to get there, but you will!
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Way to go Julie! Congrats on the site.
Ted