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- StyleHop's Hunt For Hot Fashion Comes To An End As It Heads To The DeadPool
- Moot On 4Chan User Survey: "It's Total Garbage."
| StyleHop's Hunt For Hot Fashion Comes To An End As It Heads To The DeadPool | Top |
| Over two years ago I wrote about a startup called StyleHop that set out to identify hot fashion items through the use of casual games — instead of having to fill out a survey or poll, it would generate fashion recommendations based on how you played these games. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out (nor did the startup’s second business plan) and today the company is announcing that it will be shutting its doors early next month. Some of the company’s struggles stem from the financial meltdown of 2008 — founder David Reinke explains that after raising some seed money, StyleHop was planning to close a Series A in October 2008, which happened to be right when Sequoia’s RIP: Good Times was making the rounds. The funding round never happened, and the company quickly had to shift gears from its consumer-facing fashion games to something more directly related to generating revenue. This second model was to help retailers with their merchandise selection by assembling a consumer panel of women who had proven that they could pick winning items. To create this panel StyleHop asked prospective panelists to rate items that had already been released, and compared their predictions to historical data to see who had the keenest eye. StyleHop signed up two big-box retailers as pilot customers, who used the service to pick out which fashion items to feature in their stores the following season. And it apparently worked: Reinke says that StyleHop panelist predictions were seven times more accurate that the predictions of in-house ‘product pickers’ when comparing how each item sold versus how much inventory had been ordered. Unfortunately, despite these encouraging results, the service couldn’t land any larger-scale rollouts. Reinke attributes this in part to the company’s lack of funding, and also to the fact that many retailers weren’t ready to experiment with new merchandising techniques during the economic downturn. He also believes that StyleHop may have taken the wrong approach when dealing with these retailers — it was mostly negotiating with middle- to senior-level managers, some of whom could have their jobs potentially threatened if the system worked. Instead, Reinke thinks StyleHop should have tried to work more directly with CEOs and company boards. The failure of StyleHop is interesting in part because there are currently an increasing number of services looking to reinvent the way fashion is selected and presented to consumers. ModCloth has done extremely well turning this model on its head (see my interview with the founders right here ), and Moxsie is also looking to help crowdsource merchandise selection. However, both of these are targeting the indie fashion market — StyleHop was hoping to reinvent merchandising for mass-market stores. StyleHop has been added to the TechCrunch Deadpool . CrunchBase Information StyleHop Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Moot On 4Chan User Survey: "It's Total Garbage." | Top |
| Over the weekend, a interesting demographic survey of over 6000 4Chan users made the rounds of 4Chan , Reddit and Hacker News . While if anyone is going to skew a survey it’s 4Chan users, the Google document with the responses given a lot of Internet ink, lauded for being “bracingly honest. “ I emailed 4Chan founder moot a.k.a Christopher Poole to get his take on what one commenter called “One of the best representations of the youth in the 21st century.” “It’s total garbage,” Poole responded. When asked if this was yet another example of media trolling (remember TIME’s ‘Person of the Year 2009′? ), Poole clarified “It’s ‘real’ in the sense that a random user conducted it and I imagine he collected responses on 4chan. But the questions, answers, sample, method used, etc aren’t exactly scientific. It should be taken with a massive grain of salt.” 4Chan user genkouhande, who set up the ongoing poll as a project on December 24th, tells TechCrunch that while all surveys do have error, he’s confident with the results, having included test responses like “Age: Over 59,” “Started masturbating: Over 18,” and “Time spent on 4Chan: 24+” to help trap the trolls. “ As more people answered the survey the results seemed to be less chaotic and have now been pretty typical,” he said. Poole tells us that 4Chan itself does not collect any sort of demographic data and that there are no plans to conduct any sort of official OKCupid-type survey, “Kind of defeats the point of an anonymous message board, doesn’t it?” Heh. You can view the full results or take the survey yourself here . CrunchBase Information 4chan Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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