WEARDROBE
Role
Co-Founder & Chief Product & Design Officer
Date
2008 - 2010
Stage
Seed
Industry
Creator
OUTCOME
Acq. by Google
ACCOLADES
fbFund Finalist, SXSW Accelerator Winner 2008
Introduction
In 2007 the word influencer didn't exist. Neither did creator economy. The people who would build both were already online, photographing their outfits every day and posting them to Flickr groups and MySpace — platforms that had nothing to do with fashion and no way to find anyone in it.
I co-founded Weardrobe to give them a place where they belonged.
Building Our Community
In 2009, we brought our online community to life through the Weardrobe Conference, one of the first influencer meetups of its kind.
We invited top fashion bloggers from across the country to New York City for a weekend of panels, collaborations, and photo shoots, in partnership with Topshop, PacSun, Gilt Group, Tumblr, and the Gramercy Park Hotel.
The Weardrobe Conference Bloggers
Tavi Gevinson of Style Rookie
Jessica Schroeder of WhatIWore
Rebecca Stice of The Clothes Horse
Noelle & Joelle Sadler of The Owls are Not What They Seem
Katy Seibel of Kansas Couture
Christine Cameron of My Style Pill
Lucrecia Lee of Fashion is Poison
Laurel Stovall of It's Her Factory
Arabelle Sicardi of Fashion Pirates
Erin Hagstrom of Calivintage
Keiko Lynn
Claire Geist of Faboo
Krystal Bick of This Time Tomorrow
Amy Nelson of Flying a Kite
Brooke Kao of The Fashion Void that is DC
Audrey Leary of Homerunballerina
Kyla of Blue Collar Kyla
Kelly Framel of The Glamourai
Sara Neville of Style Magnet
Greta Eagan of Fashion Me Green
_____
Photo by Eddie Newton
"It's like summer fashion camp!"
Kate & Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte
Finding Value
When we started Weardrobe, we had no idea what success would look like. There was no grand plan for monetization or acquisition — just a belief that if we built something people loved, we’d figure it out along the way.
Our strategy was essentially curiosity: keep building, keep learning, and see where the community took us.
We didn't fully see what we'd built. The buyer did.
After the Conference, Munjal Shah — founder and CEO of Like.com, a visual shopping platform spending more than $1M a month on Google ads to own fashion search — noticed that for nearly every fashion query, "black Zara jeans" to "H&M sweater," Weardrobe was the #1 organic result, often holding multiple spots on the first page.
The engine was simple: every outfit our members posted came tagged with brands. Thousands of real people posting daily had built a living catalog of fashion — a search index no retailer could match, updating itself every day. Like.com was paying millions for clicks we were earning for free.
So they bought us. A year later, Google bought them.
15k
Community Members
#1
Organic Search for Thousands of Fashion Queries
$3.2M
Acquired by Google via Like.com
In collaboration with
Suzanne Xie