StyleSaint, an Los Angeles-based apparel design and retail company, has an unusual origin story. It did not begin with an apparel product: Rather, it started as a community-driven self-publishing platform, inviting Internet users to create their own online magazines, or "tear sheets," with inspiring imagery that they could then embed on their blogs or share on social media. Months later, StyleSaint's founder and chief designer, Allison Beal, used those early tear sheets to inspire her first collection — a collection she could be confident would appeal to StyleSaint's passionately style-driven community.
Today, Beal continues to create collections every six to eight weeks from the tear sheets built on StyleSaint's website, offering them directly to online shoppers at prices ranging from $30 to $200. Brian Garrett, a longtime venture capitalist who serves as StyleSaint's president and chief operations officer, says he believes the fashion industry's top-down approach, in which a designer dictates styles that are then purchased or rejected by consumers, is a "broken system." By tapping the customer in the beginning of the design process — and offering it directly, without standard retail markup — StyleSaint believes it's offering fashion it knows its customers want at wholesale prices. Aesthetically, Garrett likens StyleSaint's clothes to Rag & Bone and ALC, but at a quarter of the price.
It's a compelling narrative, but not entirely accurate: Designers and retailers are in constant communication with their customers, both on an individual and aggregate level, about the clothes they'll want next season — and they design and stock accordingly. What's unique about StyleSaint's approach is its initial focus on building a small, devoted and creative online community and designing clothes specifically for them. Moving forward, Garrett says, the company will be looking to acquire customers outside of that community.
The strategy appears to have convinced investors. In the past year and a half, StyleSaint has raised $5.8 million in funding from an impressive group, including General Catalyst Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and The Honest Company founder Brian Lee.
In the video above, Beal, Garrett and advisor Jimmy Yaffe, who is also the chief strategy officer of web publisher Ziff Davis, discuss their vision and how they're testing for scale.
Image: StyleSaint
via fashion - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHfXG1Uka9WJA0kgSNXrT3asWAllw&url=http://mashable.com/2013/10/22/stylesaint-scaling-smarter/
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