Ok I take it back… this site is actually pretty incredibly cool. After playing around with it for an hour — I’m hooked. I’d actually been thinking about this for the past 6 months or so… when would someone create a tool that allows online shoppers to browse repositories of fashion across all the sites? How annoying does that getting — go to shopbop.com, look for dresses, go to nordstrom.com, look for dresses, go to saks.com, look for dresses. I actually created my own quick links to various categories of clothing in my Kaboodle lists to save myself clicks. Bing Bang! ShopStyle finally got it. Time to go nuts ladies!

I also am finding their stylebook creator to be pretty nifty after all. It’s much more dynamic that I realized. The UI is well though out and seemingly engineered… with a few exceptions.

Features I’m Digging

1. Advanced Search for Fashion Goods
   What’s so great about ShopStyle’s search is the functionality to constrain your search down by brand, store, % sale, price, size — or better yet a combo of any of those variables.

   Here’s an example of how you’d select the stores to constrain the search by:

   + Click on item to see enlarged view

   

2. Set Price Alert
   I can see I’ll be quite addicted to this bad boy. How many times have you found something you wanted but wanted to wait until it went on sale to "close the deal"? Problem solved! Just set the "price alert" on the item in ShopStyle and you’ll be emailed when the item goes on sale. See below.

   + Click on item to see enlarged view

   

    

3. StyleBook Creator
   As mentioned in Shopstyle.com — A New fashion Search Engine or Another Fashion Social Network?, you can create stylebooks which are almost like your own fashion spreads, or features of items you think make a unique grouping or fashion statement.

   For starters, I’m hoping they give us more flexibility when re-arranging items. Currently, you got to click on each item to move it around spot by spot. See below.

   1. 

      What would be even better is drag and drop!

ShopStyle got one thing right.. and I’m not sure if they got there w/o even realizing they were doing it, but they’ve provided the ability for bloggers to create fashion feature sets/spreads like we normally do w/o all the extra work. Good job guys!

It looks like a new fashion search engine is on the rise… my guess is that ShopStyle wants to be much more than a search engine though. It looks like they’ve got a pretty good following in a short amount of time (93,058th rank on alexa.com. ShopStyle users can browse the items ShopStyle has cataloged from major fashion retailers like J.Crew, Saks, etc, then create "stylebooks" featuring items they like in a set or grouping — kind of like a spread in a fashion magazine.

The intro on their "About Company" page reads:

"Picture the fantasy fashion magazine—page after page devoted only to must-haves from the best stores and hottest designers.
Now imagine shopping straight from those pages, without leaving home. That’s the need ShopStyle fills for the serious
fashion consumer. And it’s just the beginning of a revolution in the fashion industry powered by technology.

Launched in January 2007 as the first and only shopping engine devoted entirely to fashion, ShopStyle.com gives
style-conscious consumers a place to shop the online stores they trust, all in one place. An aggregator of both
fashion and people, ShopStyle.com brings users together to build and share looks and Stylebooks with friends,
family and the fashionista network."

Any Good?

To tell you the truth it took me some time to understand what the heck I was supposed to find actually interesting or helpful on the site. Besides the fact that a few of my favorite bloggers (Shop Diary, Coutorture, Invade My Closet, and more) have accounts on ShopStyle… I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be coming back frequently. I think ShopStyle faces the same issue that the rest of the Fashion Social Networks like Kaboodle, TeamSugar, Stylehive, and Polyvore face… keeping the user-generated content high quality w/o stifling the community with regulation and governance. Tell me you don’t see a whole lotta crap in some of these sites! It’s tiring filtering through all the stuff that you’re not interested in.

I must say… they were not the "only shopping engine devoted entirely to fashion". Like.com came way before them.

What I can see is that they did a good job of
getting in front of the right people — the Fashion bloggers! It’s the
fashion bloggers who will lead the fashion movement online. Any way you
can get them to particpate within your sites/applications you’re on the
right track. In the next few years I gather we’ll be seeing a lot more
tools tempting us bloggers away from the traditional tools like
Typepad, Blogger, etc. I know that once the right tool is out there for
me, I’ll be saying goodbye to this clunky interface myself!

What I liked in Shop Style

Here are a few of the ShopStyle Books that actually seemed pretty good.

Mom is Coming to Town by Coutorture

Rainbow Bubbles by Coutoture

Paris in the 1940’s by Dita Von Teese

Things They Need to Fix

• Make it easier to link back to individual stylebooks. As you can see above I couldn’t even link directly to the stylebook.
• Make their widget editor more flexible for us bloggers to post within our blogs.
• Add less mainstream and more luxe stores to their index — Talbots? Speigel? Eddie Bauer?? Yech yo!
• I’m assuming you can’t add items yourself from stores ShopStyle is not already affiliated with… that suxe!

Go to www.shopstyle.com to start defining your own ShopStyle. Test it out and let me know what you think… I’m going to play around with it some more too!