Very nicely done. If you did this for Indian celebrities, VCs in India would throw eight figure sums to buy you out.
As an immigrant, I'd say Americans are relatively more rational ie. not so celeb-crazy as to completely remodel themselves after a celebrity, though teens, especially teen girls tend to be an the outlier in this aspect. But if you look at celeb-crazy countries like India, you have grown men & women in their 20s,30s,40s...who will ape celeb dresses, celeb haircuts, celeb behavior even. I have had the unfortunate experience of sitting through entire 3-hour Bollywood films where all the audience did was take notes on what the lead heroine was wearing so they could go home & purchase those exact outfits.
>>I have had the unfortunate experience of sitting through entire 3-hour Bollywood films where all the audience did was take notes...
As an Indian I find this strange, when and where did this happen?
I know we are Bollywood crazy nation, and we tend to over do celebrity worship. But going to a movie just to take notes? That's a little going too far.
In Italy (I bet more generally in EU) I see more the use case of knowing what a celebrity wears, but have a couple of alternatives to do a good match, without looking exactly the same... food for thoughts :) Great work btw!
Thanks for the kind words about the site! I would disagree that American's are "not so celeb-crazy." I think many American's are very in tune with celebrities. Not just their clothing, but every aspect of their life. Though some people might not want to duplicate an exact look, we feel many are looking to celebs for the latest fashion inspiration. Thanks again!
You need to sign up for Viglink or Skimlinks ASAP - the fact that you aren't using affiliate links is literally costing you.
Those services are a single line of javascript which automatically affiliates any outgoing link, and they are perfect for sites like this where you can't waste time trying to maintain affiliate accounts with hundreds of advertisers.
No offense to you, of course, but the fact that sites pop up on HN regularly of this type without affiliate links amazes me.
If you're curating the products and links manually (as this site appears to be doing), then sign up to the 4 or 5 affiliate programs directly.
It's insane that anyone would give away 25%+ of their current revenue and future revenue to save a few minutes work.
Even if you are not curating links and are using user generated content... only use Viglink and Skimlinks as a stop-gap for you identifying your key revenue sources and going direct.
Thanks for the feedback! We agree and are joining affiliate programs to many retailers as fast as we can. Our first focus was to create a great experience for our community. We are in the process of converting our links to affiliate links now. We feel that Viglink and Skimlink's cost does not justify the time savings.
I like the concept - most of these kinds of posts are done completely ad hoc and are distributed across all of the various men's fashion forums - but the URL made me think this was going to be a breakdown of famous outfits worn by characters in TV and movies (e.g. The Driver's outfit from Drive).
Also, most of the outfits you picked are pretty stale. Go for one that are more exciting or with pieces that would be more difficult to figure out.
Very nice! I just placed an order on the watch that Daniel Craig wears [1] (not because he wears them, just because I like them) and noticed that there is no affiliate code in your links to amazon!?
The main scalability issue with this is that the products you've found will quickly go out of stock, so as you build up a collection of outfits you'll face an increasing burden going back and checking all of the products to see if they're in stock (or risk damaging your brand).
I worked on something similar back in 2008. We were looking at ways of monetising our visual similarity engine. We could mark a set of query products for each outfit and return a selection of products that were both similar and in-stock and give the customer the option of filtering by price range or whatever.
There were some nice challenges in there, like processing gigabytes of retailer feeds as rapidly as possible looking for new items, standardising various huge feeds without using up developer time, product deduplication, image feature extraction, designing the indexing method (we ended up using the Visual Words technique with a custom distributed Lucene inverted index as Solr didn't support partitions at the time). It was a really fun project... and I've drifted far enough off topic that I'm going to finish up.
The tech was pretty solid (and replicable if you can get someone decent to do the CBIR piece) but we ran out of runway.
Great points! Thanks for taking the time for the feedback. We are already realizing the problems with constant price and stock changes. So, our focus now is to provide a great daily resource for those who visit the site and subscribe to the daily mailing list. Fashion, seasons, and clothes are constantly going out of style. Even if we did keep up with the prices and stock, some styles would eventually be irrelevant to our some of our community. Also, we have started adding profile pages for each featured celeb. On this page, you can see every outfit we have featured from that celeb. We think it will be neat to see how that particular celebrity's fashion evolves over time. Thanks again!
Isn't that problem self-solving? Who wants to dress like a celebrity dressed last season- you want what they're wearing this season. Keep it up to date, with what's "in" now.
Since you asked, something wonky is going on in Chrome on Nexus 7. Your site seems to fall back to almost no CSS, with plain links where a menu should presumably be. No tooltip functionality. It also disables any zoom and defaults to a really awkward level where I can see one side of the clothes images and about half the main picture at a time.
This looks pretty neat and you did a great job with your Pin It buttons. You may wish to consider adding this META:
<meta name="pinterest" content="nohover"></meta>
... to the HEAD of any page that already has a Pin It button aboard. This will tell the Pinterest browser extension not to bother showing hoverbuttons on this page.
Funnily enough, asos.com, which is something like the third biggest UK Internet company now (according to some slightly dubious stats that were posted here a month or two ago), actually started out with a similar premise: they don't mention it much these days (a tiny link in the footer which leads to a page looking like it needs a bit of love [0]), but the acronym originally stood for "As Seen On Screen", and you could buy near-replicas of clothing worn by stars both on and off the screen. Back when I was young and impressionable, I bought a leather jacket much like one of the ones Brad Pitt wore in "Fight Club".
Suggestions from Mrs Browl - great, but do the same for celebrities of different ethnicities and sizes. There are plenty of guys who are shaped like Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, John Goodman - all of whom are well dressed.
Nice execution. We had a similar idea called http://www.pinchthelook.com but for women. The feedback was great and people 'loved' the site but ultimately we couldn't get to a scale where there was enough traffic and clicks to make it worthwhile. Engagement isn't fantastic since it's more of a quick browse and if I like something click away from site.
Perhaps this idea will work better for Men as they probably need a bit more help in piecing together a look (more often than not) ;)
Nice looking site. As far as traffic goes, perhaps you might want to re-consider your page titles/headers as well as include more content with targeted keywords. I can't imagine many people are searching using terms like "short and sweet". Also, your content is quite sparse when it comes down to it, which means there's really not a whole lot for search engines to index.
I don't think you need to use celebrities at all. If you had well dressed men with different styles with links to the stores where one can purchase the items, I think men will like it more. I don't think a lot of men feel comfortable with "dressing like a celebrity" but most don't mind getting ideas for a wardrobe. It will also solve the issue of rights infringements.
The only thing I didn't like is the links to the socks that are not visible in the picture.
This is a great idea. I would be careful going too cheap on the recommended pieces. For example, on the Theo James, there is no way I would buy a Haynes T-shirt. If super-cheap is your target market, then great. But, you could also go thewirecutter style and have "Get this look for under $100" and "A more expensive version". Good luck on the execution!
Thanks for the feedback. Our aim is "affordable." Unfortunately, that's pretty subjective. So, we try to appeal to a broad audience under that umbrella. We could link to a GAP shirt one day and a Hanes the next. With that said, we are definitely going to feature "Get this look for $_____" like you suggested. Great idea.
He/she is also infringing on IP rights. For example they are photoshopping out the model from Amazon and Lord and Taylor product pages and reusing those images without permission. Even though it's not for profit as soon as it gets large enough for those companies to notice the creator can expect a cease and desist letter.
I was going to respond in a snarky tone about the absurdity of there being such a thing as personality rights. Fortunately, I googled it first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
Not to mention the copyrights of the photographers who took the photos, assuming these haven't been licensed.
The companies and freelance photographers who focus on the celebrity market are some of the most aggressive you'll encounter in protecting their rights.
It would be a much better customer experience if you could buy the entire outfit in one action -- add outfit to cart, checkout, done -- instead of going to each product's ecommerce site individually, which would take quite a long time. I realize these are all different stores operating on disparate platforms -- Hybris, Magento, Oracle ATG, Elastic Path, etc. -- but aggregating it somehow via a middle platform would be much more seamless to the end user. And the site operators could take a small cut.
I like the simplicity of it. I could see myself actually using this to buy a new outfit, whereas for most fashion sites I feel hopelessly lost because, truthfully, I just need someone to tell me what to get. I have a vague desire to dress well, but I find I just can't be bothered to keep up on trends to research how different pieces go together myself.
Presenting a clean list of outfits from which I can choose, with each outfit having every individual component already mapped out, represents an easy compromise.
[+] [-] dxbydt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandeepj|11 years ago|reply
This is our new mockup - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18011058/Mockup%2015.jpg
Current site is http://www.JanjuaClothing.com
Please let me know where to find VCs in India who would throw eight figure sum on us.
You glorified it way beyond it is. I am from India and there is nothing like this :-)
[+] [-] encoderer|11 years ago|reply
....Said nobody ever :)
[+] [-] kamaal|11 years ago|reply
As an Indian I find this strange, when and where did this happen?
I know we are Bollywood crazy nation, and we tend to over do celebrity worship. But going to a movie just to take notes? That's a little going too far.
[+] [-] therealdrag0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecesena|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natewinn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huangc10|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jasongill|11 years ago|reply
Those services are a single line of javascript which automatically affiliates any outgoing link, and they are perfect for sites like this where you can't waste time trying to maintain affiliate accounts with hundreds of advertisers.
No offense to you, of course, but the fact that sites pop up on HN regularly of this type without affiliate links amazes me.
[+] [-] buro9|11 years ago|reply
If you're curating the products and links manually (as this site appears to be doing), then sign up to the 4 or 5 affiliate programs directly.
It's insane that anyone would give away 25%+ of their current revenue and future revenue to save a few minutes work.
Even if you are not curating links and are using user generated content... only use Viglink and Skimlinks as a stop-gap for you identifying your key revenue sources and going direct.
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troels|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomhschmidt|11 years ago|reply
Also, most of the outfits you picked are pretty stale. Go for one that are more exciting or with pieces that would be more difficult to figure out.
[+] [-] usaphp|11 years ago|reply
1. http://famousoutfits.com/dress-like-daniel-craig/
[+] [-] whatnottt|11 years ago|reply
I'd order straight away and pay a premium to save the hazzle. A logistics challenge for sure, but you'd have at least one customer right here.
[+] [-] drinkzima|11 years ago|reply
And the celeb style guide: http://www.celebritystyleguide.com/
[+] [-] richmarr|11 years ago|reply
I worked on something similar back in 2008. We were looking at ways of monetising our visual similarity engine. We could mark a set of query products for each outfit and return a selection of products that were both similar and in-stock and give the customer the option of filtering by price range or whatever.
There were some nice challenges in there, like processing gigabytes of retailer feeds as rapidly as possible looking for new items, standardising various huge feeds without using up developer time, product deduplication, image feature extraction, designing the indexing method (we ended up using the Visual Words technique with a custom distributed Lucene inverted index as Solr didn't support partitions at the time). It was a really fun project... and I've drifted far enough off topic that I'm going to finish up.
The tech was pretty solid (and replicable if you can get someone decent to do the CBIR piece) but we ran out of runway.
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveLond|11 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I know nothing about fashion.
[+] [-] lotophage|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|11 years ago|reply
I took a couple of screenshots: http://imgur.com/LFulxvD http://imgur.com/eTgyjwV
[+] [-] vadvi|11 years ago|reply
similar problem on http://famousoutfits.com/dress-like-blake-griffin/
[+] [-] recalibrator|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevesearer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muglug|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kentbrew|11 years ago|reply
<meta name="pinterest" content="nohover"></meta>
... to the HEAD of any page that already has a Pin It button aboard. This will tell the Pinterest browser extension not to bother showing hoverbuttons on this page.
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshimmin|11 years ago|reply
Funnily enough, asos.com, which is something like the third biggest UK Internet company now (according to some slightly dubious stats that were posted here a month or two ago), actually started out with a similar premise: they don't mention it much these days (a tiny link in the footer which leads to a page looking like it needs a bit of love [0]), but the acronym originally stood for "As Seen On Screen", and you could buy near-replicas of clothing worn by stars both on and off the screen. Back when I was young and impressionable, I bought a leather jacket much like one of the ones Brad Pitt wore in "Fight Club".
[0]: http://www.asos.com/asos-as-seen-on-screen/cat/pgehtml.aspx?...
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
That's extra funny because his character in that movie more or less directly argues against such behaviour!
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] backwardm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralphos|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps this idea will work better for Men as they probably need a bit more help in piecing together a look (more often than not) ;)
[+] [-] mtbcoder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skuunk1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calmturtle|11 years ago|reply
I don't think you need to use celebrities at all. If you had well dressed men with different styles with links to the stores where one can purchase the items, I think men will like it more. I don't think a lot of men feel comfortable with "dressing like a celebrity" but most don't mind getting ideas for a wardrobe. It will also solve the issue of rights infringements.
The only thing I didn't like is the links to the socks that are not visible in the picture.
[+] [-] orasis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootedbox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timfrietas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric_h|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
The companies and freelance photographers who focus on the celebrity market are some of the most aggressive you'll encounter in protecting their rights.
[+] [-] jadlimcaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chandraonline|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtournemille|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilkn|11 years ago|reply
Presenting a clean list of outfits from which I can choose, with each outfit having every individual component already mapped out, represents an easy compromise.