The social shopping startup The Fancy received a $10 million investment from the French fashion conglomerate PPR (Gucci, Puma, and lately also Brioni). This is not the first contact for PPR in the online segment, having previously been active with MyFab. At first glance, the luxury brand company is an atypical investor and this sentiment has been reflected in the tech scene:
"Interestingly, the big bucks don’t come from a typical venture investor, but from a new lead investor PPR, the $16 billion French multi-national run by Francois Henri-Pinault, which owns the globe’s biggest fashion brands, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. PPR has earned a reputation for its smart, aggressive acquisition strategy and saw its stock jump after an impressive third quarter, but is little known in the tech world."
When users register with The Fancy, they are able to tag items they like with a “Fancy!” label, thus allowing the selection to be followed by other users. Afterwards, images of what other users have found on the net are put together into a visually appealing stream:
"Why the big interest from the world of high fashion? The Fancy is part of a new breed of startups that encourage users to clip and share their favorite images from the web.
Tumblr is the originator of this behavior, and generated a lot of interest among big fashion brands. Pinterest, which just raised a large round of its own, was the evolution of this business to a much more product-focused service.
Like both these sites, the Fancy is about visual discovery and has become a natural home for fashion brands, which see a high level of engagement from tastemakers around their goods. Clicking around the site a bit, we discovered that Mr. Pinault, husband of Salma Hayek, is quite the active user himself."
The bookmarklet from The Fancy automatically collects the biggest pictures and their descriptions from surfed shopping sites, which is then incorporated into the URL of that particular item page of The Fancy. This could be viewed as a kind of SEO strategy, which if successful, would not be to the appreciation of some online merchants.
Here an example of a bookmarklet on the site from Frontline Shops:
One of the income streams for The Fancy could be affiliates. Also the intelligent linking between mobile snapshots and retailers who offer the products could be pursued. And there are naturally several more possibilities to imagine: if successful, The Fancy (or other similar startup) would be able to create an efficient aggregation layer above the individual shop level.
The Fancy implements what has already been described here at Exciting Commerce under the moniker of the “Social Web Pattern”:
- The follower principle within the user group.
- A stream which is relevant for the application area. In this case via the bookmarklet installed by the users, the collected product photos are attractively compiled and presented. According to availability, larger photos will be exchanged by smaller photos. Smaller photos are presented besides each other, creating an impression of a catalog. Users can choose if “Featured Items” or other special categories will be displayed in the stream.
- A big “Fancy it” button appears when rolling over a product photo. With that, the one-click gesture is implemented without having the interface too cluttered. There is also of course a site with popular items.
The result is a very visual social shopping site that brings together all the necessary components while still looking good.
Could The Fancy be a candidate for the much sought after “Twitter for Shoppers”? The attempt, which models itself after the successful blog platform Tumblr is definitely one to watch.
Related posts:
- One Click Gestures and the Social Web Pattern in E-commerce
- Editd Aiming to Change The Fashion Industry With Real Time Data
- Garmz: On The Fashion Front with Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing
Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss and Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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