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May 24, 2009
Spotlight on: Sense of Fashion
I enjoy feeling the passion of entrepreneurs who dream about doing their own startup. During the past few years, during my trips to Israel, I have met with quite a number of entrepreneurs and have made investments in a number of early-early stage startups.
In 2007 when I first met fashionista and part time indie-fashion designer, Daria Shualy while she was telling me about the problem she saw with online experience of Fashion, when I started to feel the passion she used to tell her story, I felt she was onto something that could become BIG. Daria explained to me that while in the offline world, indie fashion was very much a social experience, where friends go shopping together, shoppers become trendsetter as they wear and promote their favorite designers, and where young designers are also shoppers themselves, the online experience remained segregated and incomplete. In the online world you either had selling platforms, or platforms for fashionistas showing off, or groups within existing platform which were UGC, but lacked the tools they needed. And so the idea came to her head, to imitate the very organic and live experience of offline indie-fashion, in the online world, by creating a home to indie-fashion fans and designers, a place where everyone can show, sell, buy, and interact freely.
After hearing her pitch I told Daria that I was interested in helping her get her startup started and Sense of Fashion was born. As a result, I made an investment and I am happy to have Sense of Fashion as part of my active portfolio of Israeli Hi-Tech startups.
If you were to ask Daria to describe what Sense of Fashion has evolved into since she first pitched me in 2007, Sense of Fashion “...is now a place where anyone can open a page, add a limitless amount of fashion photos – from what you wear, your favorite fashion items, fashionable people in the street, and of course you're designs if you're a designer – and everyone can shop, and sell (for a small sales commission).
Everyone on Sense of Fashion is a trendsetter, showing off their style and promoting any designer they wish. The designers get a real live clientèle base, which responds quickly and freely to their designs, and all users get the social shopping experience, using such unique features as Fashion Emergency, enabling you to ask all friends to vote and help you decide which dress looks better on you, or which of two sneakers to buy.”
Daria's two co-founders are the CTO, Yariv Habot – which was the sole founder of Israblog – Israel's first and most successful to date blog service, which was sold to Netvision in 2006. And Yael Givon – who was former VP of Product and Marketing for Speedbit and Director of Marketing for AOL (in ICQ).
Daria herself has experience as creative director for content on the Web, print media and TV.
The Sense of Fashion web site was launched a month ago, and already has been recognized by killerstartups.com and on Sao Paulo Fashion Week website.
I congratulate Daria and her team for just completing their second round of seed funding. I look forward to watching the Sense of Fashion grow in significance within the fashion industry.
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Tags: Sense of Fashion, StartUp, Tel Aviv,Israel, Daria Shualy, Social Media, Jeff Pulver
Posted by jeff on May 24, 2009 11:33 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Good article,I want to copy it to my blog,Can I?
Posted by: Fashion News at January 3, 2010 07:34 PM
Shopping is what Fashion designer and models adore, that is why they are in the business
Posted by: Amjad at May 30, 2009 09:22 AM
This sounds like a great idea, thanks so much for sharing this story with us :)
Posted by: Susan at May 25, 2009 02:25 AM