Online fashion community Fashiolista raises $500,000 from Atomico

I can’t even figure out how to pronounce it.

The thing is when you add something to Polyvore it actually takes the right image off the page most of the time. It can then be made into mood boards and style sets which is quite useful for users, bloggers and retailers. Fashiolista’s love button is as annoying as Facebook’s share, frequently taking the wrong thing, like the company logo, instead of the item of clothing.

There’s a lack of hacks to put it into a social service like Addthis. They support it but you get the wrong image issue. Polyvore can be supported by Addthis but hacked at the same time to allow the right photo is taken.

That said, whilst Fashiolista is some way behind Polyvore, it’s a league better than Chiq or StyleHive. Chiq’s page scraping is so bad it wants you type in a minimum 100 character description of a share – surely that should come straight from the retailer but have the option of the the sharer editing it? On top of making extra work for the sharer, Chiq, also messes up the image selection often enough.

Ignoring that the reasons these sites do well is because young girls generally like to natter about fashion and beauty just the way guys like to cluster around car and gadget blogs, why is it so few start ups seem to be able to make a good bookmarking tool for retailers? All it should take is one click for the user and they should be able to share the location, description, price and main image. In fact in an ideal set up, that share would be platform agnostic and as easy to send to Facebook or Tumblr etc as it is to compile of the provider’s own site. And do obvious things like make your buttons the same size as everyone else’s so it’ll fit nicely next to the Facebook like and Tweetmeme RT buttons.

I like what Fashiolista are trying to do, despite it’s shortcomings. We get good results as a retailer from Polyvore and do think that there’s plenty of room for others to great things. With the advent of skimlinks type technologies monitising it should be a bit easier too.