Interesting point on Jeremy’s blog. Hey, Jeremy, you must have missed my video interview with Munjal Shah. He just came back from a press tour where he talked with tons of fashion and consumer magazine editors (he told me that he’ll have tons of great PR in that world coming soon).
Jeremy’s right. Riya needs to focus Like.com to fashion and clothes buyers (although I think he underestimates just how much men do play a role here). One thing, though. Most guys I know have women in their lives. Like me.
I might never use Like.com again. But I definitely told Maryam about it. I bet she uses it (although she doesn’t like buying things on the Internet, she told me, and would rather go into a store).
So, by hitting all these geeky male-oriented blogs I bet that Riya sees quite a bit of passalong and hits today from women.
Also, there’s another effect that’s good. We (the audience) just beta tested and stress tested Like.com. Now we’ll move onto the next cool thing to come up TechMeme. That’ll leave those 250 servers waiting for the PR from all those fashion and consumer blogs and magazines. They typically are a bit slower, so now the site is tested out, the engineers can tweak things based on the load we all threw at it this morning playing around, and it’ll be ready for business.
It’s a brilliant marketing strategy if you ask me. Not to mention that now we are doing a second wave of conversation about whether or not the strategy itself is brilliant or just totally lame.
Well played Munjal!
Scobleizer 
Robert, Unfortunately I did not get a chance to watch the video yet, but that’s great to hear.
In the meanwhile, I’ve had my wife and a couple of friends on there with the challenge of “find a purse” and they weren’t thrilled with the system yet. I think it’s still too techie for them, but hopefully they’ll take this time to learn and adapt quickly.
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Robert, Unfortunately I did not get a chance to watch the video yet, but that’s great to hear.
In the meanwhile, I’ve had my wife and a couple of friends on there with the challenge of “find a purse” and they weren’t thrilled with the system yet. I think it’s still too techie for them, but hopefully they’ll take this time to learn and adapt quickly.
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I had a quick look and it “feels” like a tech site. It has no “fashion” feel and this could be a big drawback in engaging its potential audience. It’s why Maryam prefers to shop in stores.
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I had a quick look and it “feels” like a tech site. It has no “fashion” feel and this could be a big drawback in engaging its potential audience. It’s why Maryam prefers to shop in stores.
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John: no, actually, she just likes touching things before she buys them.
But, look at all the fashion blogs: http://www.apparelsearch.com/fashion/Fashion_Blogs.htm
Are they any better looking than Like.com?
Do you have an example of a site that has good “fashion feel?”
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John: no, actually, she just likes touching things before she buys them.
But, look at all the fashion blogs: http://www.apparelsearch.com/fashion/Fashion_Blogs.htm
Are they any better looking than Like.com?
Do you have an example of a site that has good “fashion feel?”
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In terms of retail sites I would argue that net-a-porter.com has a superior feel (with fewer prodcuts of course) and that many fashion house and fashion store sites do as well (though admittedly the former are generally not sites from which you can buy).
Maryam wanting to touch things is exactly what I meant when I talked about “feel” – the photos on like.com didn’t feel “touchable” to me. I’m not sure whether this is because of the photos themselves, their size or because the site is dealing in such a large volume of items but it was my instinctive reaction.
The balance between function and feel is key in all retailing (online and off) and if we go back to ancient intenet history I could point to the infamous boo.com which was all feel and no function and burned through hundreds of millions of venture funding in a couple of years.
If you’re buying a book, CD or DVD online the feel is not as important – the ability to find something is. To me like.com is taking the amazon approach to fashion items. It seems to me that they have the functional side of the site in place but may need to work on the feel a little – that’s just my opinion.
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In terms of retail sites I would argue that net-a-porter.com has a superior feel (with fewer prodcuts of course) and that many fashion house and fashion store sites do as well (though admittedly the former are generally not sites from which you can buy).
Maryam wanting to touch things is exactly what I meant when I talked about “feel” – the photos on like.com didn’t feel “touchable” to me. I’m not sure whether this is because of the photos themselves, their size or because the site is dealing in such a large volume of items but it was my instinctive reaction.
The balance between function and feel is key in all retailing (online and off) and if we go back to ancient intenet history I could point to the infamous boo.com which was all feel and no function and burned through hundreds of millions of venture funding in a couple of years.
If you’re buying a book, CD or DVD online the feel is not as important – the ability to find something is. To me like.com is taking the amazon approach to fashion items. It seems to me that they have the functional side of the site in place but may need to work on the feel a little – that’s just my opinion.
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Robert – I posted this on Jeremy’s blog also… but worth repeating here.
Jeremy,
Here is what I learned during this launch.
a) We started to talk to the fashion magazines and morning shows/Oprah and found two problems: 1) The TV shoes were laggards – they wanted to see some traction already – hence the chicken and egg problem of building awareness with them; 2) The Magazines were interested but they rarely write about technology and the earliest issue we could get in was March (since it is print).
b) So we found that their is a new supply chain of news… it goes something like this. Robert and Michal post – then the business bloggers like Rob Hof of Business Week and WSJ write – then an editor at a TV station reads it in the NYTs or WSJ and calls us for an interview and finally a morning show calls us to get in front of our target demographic – women in the 10am to 3pm time slot.
This actually happened to us this week. As a result of starting on Robert and Michael we were on everywhere in the mainstream fashion and lifestyle press. You can’t go direct as a startup.
Munjal Shah
Riya
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Robert – I posted this on Jeremy’s blog also… but worth repeating here.
Jeremy,
Here is what I learned during this launch.
a) We started to talk to the fashion magazines and morning shows/Oprah and found two problems: 1) The TV shoes were laggards – they wanted to see some traction already – hence the chicken and egg problem of building awareness with them; 2) The Magazines were interested but they rarely write about technology and the earliest issue we could get in was March (since it is print).
b) So we found that their is a new supply chain of news… it goes something like this. Robert and Michal post – then the business bloggers like Rob Hof of Business Week and WSJ write – then an editor at a TV station reads it in the NYTs or WSJ and calls us for an interview and finally a morning show calls us to get in front of our target demographic – women in the 10am to 3pm time slot.
This actually happened to us this week. As a result of starting on Robert and Michael we were on everywhere in the mainstream fashion and lifestyle press. You can’t go direct as a startup.
Munjal Shah
Riya
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