Social Shopping Platform Is Like Twitter For Fashion Advice

In preparation for the release of our upcoming Future of Retail report, PSFK reached out to Go Try It On, a start-up that allows users to share photos of their style and tap into a network for feedback, tips and ideas.?Users upload a photo of themselves, add descriptions of the brands they are wearing and provide some context regarding the occasion for the outfit. Users can choose to ask for feedback from the Go Try It On community or share their pictures with their friends on Facebook. We spoke with Founder Marissa Evans, to get her thoughts.

Tell us a little about Go Try It On. How does it work?

GO TRY IT ON is a place where friends can meet over fashion. We allow members to get and give advice on what to wear and all things related to style. You can get tips and ideas from friends as well as an amazing network of women from around the world? it?s a bit of a fashion twitter, in that you can stay up to date around stylish tips by being apart of the community.

Are there any notable figures or statistics around customer engagement and usage?

We have over 300K app downloads and 16 Million opinions on the platform. The most poplar categories users share around are ?a casual day? a ?night out? and for ?beauty advice?. Our membership is 85% female and 30% international.?Avg age is around 25.

We have noticed that retailers and third parties are enabling consumers to?tap into the recommendations of their friends at various points along the purchase path. Opening up the feedback loop in this way ensures consumers feel both accommodated and supported throughout their shopping?experience, in ways replicating the social shopping experience had with?friends. Do you see this trend manifesting on a wider scale? How so?

Very much so. We are fully betting on the social shopping trend and idea. We are working to help and define what this exactly means. We recently tested a new ?suggest an item? feature on the product where members could go a step beyond making a comment and actually recommend and suggest real products from great stores (all on the iPhone). It?s a bit of real life dress up. We want to create the feeling you are in the store with your friends all picking out things together.

We saw such positive responses on this, now we are building a full fled shopping tool which allows you to suggest and recommend items directly to fiends? The idea being that if all your friends are suggesting something to you, you are much more likely to purchase. Similarly, we think brands are an incredible resources for advice as well. Brands want to be authentic and helpful and they get it that it?s a competitive space. We encourage our brand partners to pick items they love and promote them in authentic ways, and we?ve seen a great response from our user base as well, with over 40% of our users adding brands as Stylists. Brands know their merchandise best, so we want to create an environment where members can seek advice from friends, expert bloggers and brands to create one really helpful ecosystem.

What?are the opportunities for retailers partnering with or leveraging Go Try It On? How will consumers benefit from using this application?

Basically we believe brands can and do play a really powerful role in our community. We encourage retailers to leverage their knowledge about their products and share that. If you know that the new black skinny jeans you are launching for fall work great for travel because they don?t wrinkle, here?s the place to tell everyone. We want those types of practical helpful tips. We see that shared knowledge as extremely benificial for the consumer for obvious reasons. Our vision is to make the GO TRY IT ON community that place where all those great style tips and are traded? its a bit like your super stylish best friend that knows all the great secretes and this one is just made up of a lot of those women from around the world.

?Thanks Marissa!

Go Try It On

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