I just read Claire Cain Miller's article in the New York Times about Polyvore (www.polyvore.com) an apparel website that makes shopping more interactive. The site is based on Yahoo Pipes a tool developed by Pasha Sadri a software engineer at Yahoo. Yahoo Pipes allows people to aggregate content from various sites on the web.
Sadri used this tool to push digital apparel marketing into a more interactive direction. Using Yahoo Pipes Polyvore visitors download images of clothing from anywhere on the web. All Polyvore users can use these clothing items to create "sets" that look something like a scrapbook page or a mood board. Site visitors are able to create complete outfits and become a sort of web fashion editor. Polyvore tracks the images and allows viewers of someone else's "set" to use a hyperlink to the original site where they can purchase the pieces of clothing. Polyvore gets a commission when users double click or buy the clothing from certain sites. Polyvore is also exploring other relationships like sponsored content with apparel manufacturers and retailers.
The results of this small tweak to the usual static web catalog experience has been huge with more than 835K unique visitors in June which is almost 25% more than for other major sites like Style.com and InStyle.com. Polyvor has 928K registered users who make 28K new "sets" each and every day.
Polyvore is also licensing its technology to other online retailers which is probably the real way for Polyvore to make money. Pasha seems to think that clothing is uniquely suited to a Polyvore tool. But I am not so sure. Certainly, visual products are best suited to Polyvore but clothing is not the only visual product. Why not home furnishings or kitchen appliances (seems like a natural for HGTV).
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