Like.com Expands Digital Fashion Empire With Virtual Styling Tool Couturious

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Like.com has been steadily expanding its mini digital fashion empire. There is Like.com itself, a visual shopping engine; Covet.com; a recently launched visual shopping personalization application; and Weardrobe, which is a social platform for users to shop street style compilations (Like.com acquired Weardrobe last December). Today, the company is expanding its mini-empire with the launch of visual styling tool Couturious.

Couturious’ focus is on 3D photo-realistic styling. You pick a photo of a model (you can choose from a variety of races and body types) and then style the model accordingly with clothes from over 100 different brands. Like.com’s computer vision technology allows your to dress a fairly realistic model and actually style them. So you can tuck pants into boots, adjust the folding of a scarf or have the model wear the shirt with top few buttons open. And you can purchase any of the items that are styled and share your styles to Facebook and Twitter.

The idea is for users to not figure out what to wear but how to wear it. Along with the ability to style a model from scratch, users can also see pre-set styles from stylists. At launch, Couturious has partnered with 20 of the top fashion bloggers in the industry to feature their own styles. Couturious is also partnering with 6 designers at launch (Tory Burch, Tibi, Charlotte Ronson, Yigal Azrouel, Cynthia Rowley, and Alice+Olivia) who are making items they debuted at last week’s fashion week in New York City available for users to style immediately, even though these items aren’t even in stores yet.

Like.com’s CEO and founder Munjal Shah says Couturious fits the strategy of revolutionizing the online soft goods shopping experience. Weardrobe helps you to be visually inspired with streetstyle looks; Covet helps you to visually personalize your shopping (using celebrity photos), Like.com helps you to visually shop for soft goods and now Couturious will help you to visually style the items you have. Couturious makes money when people click on the links to buy the outfits, similar to the model on Like.com’s other sites. Couturious will also white label the technology to retailers and designer sites for a processing fee. Couturious will face competition from fellow styling site Polyvore.

Like.com, which launched in 2006, is growing steadily both in revenue and networks. The startup raised $32 million in funding during the implosion of the financial industry, with a valuation just north of $100 million. And while we can’t reveal what’s to come, there is definitely more innovation in store for Like.com.

Company: Like.com
Website: like.com
Launch Date: June 18, 1986
Funding: $47.3M

Unlike most other image search engines (including Google image search), like.com indexes images based on more than simple metadata and tags. Using Riya’s image recognition technology, like.com can search through a library of products and find ones similar to the look of any selected product. Users can shop for shoes, bags, watches, jewelry, clothes and much more without even typing in search terms if they choose. For image search queries Like.com matches users’ searches with similar or identical objects by...

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Company: Weardrobe
Website: weardrobe.com
Launch Date: January 1, 2008

Weardrobe is a social platform for personal fashion. It is a place where people can catalog their own clothing and easily browse through the “lookbooks” of other people’s street style. Users can upload photos, tag what they are wearing, and organize these items in a virtual closet to share with others. Tags also allow users to search and view all the clothing photos of a particular piece of clothing in their own or their friends’ wardrobes. All the content...

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Company: Covet
Website: covet.com
Launch Date: June 3, 2009

Covet is your personal shopper, searching thousands of brands from hundreds of online stores to find the most coveted fashion in your style.

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