Polyvore is spying on you... b/c you're cool

the beautiful ordinary by rockAfella featuring TopShop shoes

And because you're the virtual Anna Wintours and way ahead of the fashion curve, Polyvore, the virtual styling tool, is going to sell all of your good ideas (boiled down into trends... such as you hate chokers, but love long beaded necklaces) to companies (buyers, trend forecasters) for money. That's not necessarily a bad thing... assuming "they" listen to what your "buying" i.e. taking the time to put into your sets.

The New Yorker, in their April magazine, reported about Polyvore in an article by Alexandra Jacobs entitled, "Fashion Democracy: the world of virtual Anna Wintours."

Polyvore is actually a rather brilliant way to engage and track a very covetable consumer. Youth & early adopters, regardless of age, are hard to pin down and even harder to build allegiance and regular communication. 6.6 million fashion forward ladies do this every month on Polyvore. 1.4 million are registered users and 200,000 are creators using the sites daily.

Because users - dubbed stylists - clip and paste anything on the web to complete their sets, a careful onlooker could deduce important shopping and taste trends far earlier in the market process. Thus sidelining already passe must-haves before valuable time and money is spent putting out merchandise that no longer connects with consumers.

From my days as a social media manager and internet dork, Polyvore is an internet platform that is an ideal way for a creative company to provide a service AND to keep tabs on what the cool kids are doing. You see everything they like in real time as styled/merchandised by them - music, art, fashion, celebrities, cosmetics, and images. It's kinda nuts and a little tiny gold mind sitting under their noses. I bet Jenna Lyons at J. Crew is all over it. I would be...

From the article:

Polyvore’s most valuable asset is the intelligence that it gathers about its users’ preferences. Every day, in a section called Zeitgeist, the site presents top-twenty lists of users’ favorite brands, trends, and celebrities. Sometimes these rankings are easily explicable—after the February 11th suicide of Alexander McQueen, his brand hovered around No. 1 for weeks, as distraught creators rushed to make tribute sets—but they are sometimes just a reflection of fashion’s eternal riddle: Why boyfriend shorts? Why now? Part of the company’s business plan involves selling the statistics it’s tabulating (which Lee called “a gold mine of analytics”), to designers and to store buyers, in order to manage inventory more effectively.

“We have so much data about what is being matched with what,” said Lee, a dedicated setmaker who, like other regulars, calls herself a Polywhore. “If I click on Calvin Klein, do I also click on Helmut Lang? Are gladiator sandals going in or out? Are skinny jeans about to die?”

The company is not yet profitable, but I imagine soon they will. One other mantra that stuck with me that Polyvore keeps close is ... "Do what the user loves and the money will follow." That, of course, was what Jess Lee, 27 and VP of product management, learned from her time at Google under Marissa Meyer. I would say she is on right track.