Shopping for clothes online is difficult, especially because one brand’s size 10 can be another brand’s size 8. BeauCoo, a Calgary-based startup that is launching out of beta today, combines social networking based on women’s real body dimensions with mobile photo sharing and shopping to help female shoppers find the clothes that will look good on them. BeauCoo is currently only available on the iPhone, but the company plans to launch web, tablet and Android apps in the next six weeks. An API is also in the works and is scheduled to launch next year.
On BeauCoo, female shoppers can enter their body dimensions – and the company stresses that this information will remain confidential. The software then connects them with other women who match their measurements. While shopping, users can then take photos of themselves as they try on new clothes and share these with other BeauCoo users. Besides the photos, users can also tag their posts with information about the store and, of course, the brand and other details of the item they are wearing.
As BeauCoo’s co-founder and CEO Christian MacLean told me earlier this week, the idea here is to create a “body positive community for women to share and discover stores and style that will make them look and feel great.” In order to ensure that only women join the network, the app uses Facebook logins. BeauCoo, MacLean said, tries to solve real problems for women (clothing and store discovery), but its built-in marketing platform can also help brick-and-mortar retailers attract new customers through targeted offers and promotions the service sends to users based on their level of use. While BeauCoo is launching on the iPhone, MacLean said that it would be wrong to just look at the service as just an “app play.” The company plans to provide businesses with a full platform to target content and promotions to women with specific tastes, body types and shopping habits.
The BeauCoo team, which includes four co-founders, raised a $1.1 million funding round last month led by Zinc Ventures. This is, incidentally, also the same company that acquired the team’s last startup, the mobile app development company Decoder.
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