StyleShake, an e-commerce bespoke fashion brand, launches officially today. Headquartered in London/UK but also also available in Israel, the startup aims to allows customers to create and order individually tailor-made dress designs, share them online with other StyleShake users and, of course, wear them.
Essentially StyleShake puts design tools in the hands of customers who create designs using a simple tool Flash then. They can then order the design in a pre-selected size. Ten days later their hand-made dress turns up by mail.
StyleShake is the brainchild of former new media and online advertising professional (and mother of two), Iris Ben-David who describes StyleShake as ‘User Generated Content meets ecommerce.’ Ben-David came up with the idea out of frustration with existing online dress shopping, which prevented her from adjusting the design of the clothes on sale with the click of a mouse.
She has teamed up with designer Romina Karamanea who is StyleShake’s creative director. Karamanea was recently named one of the 100 most promising worldwide fashion designers and has shown in London and Milan fashion weeks. Also part of the team is CTO David Yanovsky, formally founder of Jetro Platform.
Now, I bet you are thinking what I was thinking: it’s all made in far-eastern sweat shops. However, I am assured by Iris that everything is made in London in the kind of clothing design studio you might find featured in the pages of a fashion magazine.
It looks to me like this is the case. I clicked on what I figured was a pretty simple dress, to be told that it would be £166. That suggests that this isn’t gong to be a mass-market brand. However, from what my wife tells me, many woman today would not blink at such prices for a good dress and would pay over the odds for very original designs you couldn’t find in the shops, and especially if they were hand-made. Plus the sharing side of StyleShake aims to build up a strong community of people who design their own clothes. Each dress can be commented on and rated.
Having said that, a couple of questions seem to stand out at launch. At some point it would be cool to allow even more bespoke tailoring, allowing women to input their their body measurements and then map their clothing designs onto them. Plus allowing them to sell the designs to each-other, thereby profiting from their own intellectual property. And currently the interface could do with some tweaking – adding ‘trimming’ was not obvious for instance. But it’s a good start. [Update: Iris calls to say they are planning to add an option to add your body measurements and also to open your own design shop.]
StyleShake raised money from Israel-based LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab, a joint venture between Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gemini Israel ( of which, interest declared, TechCrunch France’s Ouriel Ohayon is a member).