A new application called ClosetSpace from fashion analytics company Stylitics wants to put a digital closet in your pocket, while also feeding you daily inspirations, outfit suggestions, and more, as well as offering access to a personal stylist for just $25.00. The app, targeting mainly at women, is meant to serve as your centralized fashion hub that helps you with everything related to managing your personal style and finding new things to wear.
The company behind the mobile application, Stylitics, founded around three years ago, is in the business of selling data on consumer shopping habits to its brand and retailer customers. It previously offered a web and mobile application sporting the company name, which first connected its company to consumers. On this earlier platform, a smaller user base had uploaded over 1 million pieces of clothing, cataloging their own wardrobes in exchange for outfit recommendations and other “style stats,” like your most-worn or least-worm items, for example.
The new ClosetSpace app, explains company co-founder and CEO Rohan Deuskar, is really about taking everything the company has learned over three to four evolutions of its product and re-imaging how it should work in a whole new format that makes sense for consumers.
The app offers several features designed to encourage regular use among the fashion-forward, including its weather-based outfit suggestions (daily emails of suggestions based on the weather in your area, which can also be found in the app), as well as the above-mentioned “style stats;” access to a network of some 140 fashion bloggers and other community members offering inspiration and ideas; the ability to make packing and donation lists; and even an on-demand pro stylist available for $25/month via Urban Darling. This stylist, after just a few days, will suggest 10 outfits to you with details of when and how to wear them, and point you to where to buy them. (You can cancel the service at any time.)
Some of the app’s features, like the weather-based outfit suggestions, seem to cater to the type of person who more meticulously catalogs her wardrobe – maybe due to its large size – or, alternatively, because they can’t remember what they have jammed into a city apartment’s tiny closet.
It seems a bit like overkill to turn to an app in order to figure out what to wear, but Deuskar stresses that’s not the only feature.
The larger goal, he says, is for ClosetSpace to function as your fashion “central hub.”
“It’s for anyone who wants to dress better, feel more organized, or do more with the clothes they already own,” says Deuskar.
The company’s average customer is female and skews younger – around 25 years old. She’s not necessarily a high-fashion consumer, however. “We found that everyone is trying to do better at their own level,” Deuskar notes. “Certainly there’s a affluent, style-savvy customer who has the luxury of being able to try different things, but because this is a platform that helps you throughout your day…it’s a pretty varied customer.”
Users can take photos and tag the items in their own closets at home (or add them from a retailers’ catalog) in order to inform their personalized recommendations, and, if they choose, their stylists’ suggestions.
Additionally, ClosetSpace will work to connect you with offers and deals from retailers based on your closet, as well as other services that you might like to try, like laundry delivery or beauty services like GlamSquad, for example. (It will take a revenue share if you use the provided credits to try out one of these services.)
In future releases, the company will take the concept of the central hub even further, adding more features, like the ability to list items on secondhand marketplaces with one click.
The consumer app, in turn, feeds data to Stylitics’ paying customers which include a couple dozen larger contracts. One of the company’s strategic investors, the NPD Group, also connects its clients with Stylitics where they can use the business-facing features like the email insights dashboard and “closet trends” insights. This gives the business customers a real-time window into changing fashion trends, allowing them to see through the anonymized, aggregated data, when trends are fading away or new ones appear, among other things.
Access to these features may range anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 or even $100,000 per month, says Deuskar. The company, which has $4 million in outside funding, doesn’t disclose revenues, but expects to be profitable by the end of 2015.
The new app is available now for iOS and Android, while an updated web version will be live by month-end.
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