Not everybody has a designer on call to craft their wardrobe staples, but a startup called Gustin is redefining the way menswear is designed, created, and sold. Today, the company launched a fully crowdsourced, crowdfunded premium menswear brand and accompanying platform, which sets up a new model for the fashion world.

“We are turning the fashion industry on its head and breaking all the rules,” said founder Josh Gustin during an interview. “We are offering the highest-quality product, crowdsourced, and delivered at wholesale prices. Our goal is to create the perfect pair of jeans and create a super efficient collection that responds directly to what people want. The value proposition is huge, but the community is even bigger. No brand has ever tried this before on this level, and thus no other brand has the flexibility we do. When industry people started getting scared and defensive, we knew we were on to something.”

I met with Gustin and his cofounder Stephen Powell for a tour of the San Francisco production facility, which is tucked down a side road in the heart of downtown. The room was filled with stacks of denim, pockets, zippers, and thread, and the constant din of sewing machines. Unlike many clothing brands, which outsource their production overseas, Gustin and Powell’s office space is across the street and they regularly stop by to ensure that the work is up to their high standards. During the interview, they told me about the company’s background, vision, and how it came to be the largest fashion Kickstarter of all time.

Gustin entered the fashion world while attending graduate school at University of California Berkeley. He realized he’d rather pursue his fashion dreams than work in a bank. He spent a summer learning everything he could about denim and built a premium line of men’s jeans that sold in high-end boutiques. He grew frustrated with the traditional process of designing, manufacturing, convincing boutiques to sell his clothing, and then hoping consumers bought it.

Together, Gustin and Powell launched a Kickstarter campaign to back the production of the next line. They posted one style of jeans, which sold out and surpassed its $20,000 goal in less than 24 hours. To keep up with demand, the duo took a whirlwind, overnight road trip to LA, where they scooped up all the denim that caught their eye. They added more and more fabrics to the selection on their Kickstarter page, and the campaign ultimately closed at $450,000, with orders for 19 different styles.

“Clearly, we have struck a chord with people who want boutique-quality clothing at a reasonable price point, said Powell during the interview. “But Kickstarter is not a platform for sales, so we realized if this model was going to work, we would need our own platform. A lot of guys say that once they get these jeans, they never want to order anything else again. Denim is just the beginning.”

Fashion production requires a lot of guesswork. Designers and retailers have to guess what consumers will like and how many pieces of each item they are likely to buy. It is not cost-effective for brands to produce limited edition lines, and garments often sell out, or worse, don’t sell at all and gather dust on retail shelves. Gustin’s approach eliminates all the guesswork by only producing items that consumers have already backed.

“We can move so much quicker than other brands,” Powell said. We never sell out of any size or any cut because everything is custom-made. If 200 people say they want belts, we can turn that around in a day. We just ask ‘how can we make the best belt possible?’ and however much that comes out to be is how much it costs. It is still 60 percent less than other brands, and we don’t have to cut corners. It also means we can run just five pairs of a certain style if we want, without worrying about hitting a minimum.”

This platform not only cuts inefficiencies out of the manufacturing process, but it is built on a direct pipeline to consumer desires and an active level of customer engagement that other brands lust over and spend significant amounts of money to tap into. Programmer Paul Graham is known for saying “make something people want,” and Gustin’s model does exactly that. Transparency, authenticity, and quality are central to the fabric of the company.

“This is part of the same transition a lot of other industries have already been through with technology,” Gustin said. “It is a shift from power of the brand to the power of the consumer. We are laying bare the brand and saying ‘these are our beliefs, but it will be nothing unless people directly support us.’ Something about the creative element of fashion keeps brands on a pedestal and lets them keep distance from consumers. This model lets us still do the thing we love, which is never cut a corner and design everything we like, and if only a few get into production, that’s fine. Why design stuff if no one wants to wear it?

Gustin is building more than a great line of jeans. It is a company leveraging the Internet’s power of communication, the momentum of crowdsourcing, and a growing national interest in products that are high-quality and have a story behind them. The jeans themselves are an example of old-fashioned craftsmanship. Sewing machines are the most advanced piece of technology in the factory and every step of the process is human-powered. The real innovation lays in Gustin’s fresh approach to building a consumer goods company and redefining the production process in a leaner, more direct, more responsive way.

If Steve Jobs was still around, he could order 100 pairs of Gustins just for himself. Although he was dedicated to another little San Francisco denim company called Levis.

Photo Credit: Gustin

Don’t have time to obsess over the latest fashion trends? Launching today, a new service called Ajent is bringing curated style options to busy professionals.

Most e-commerce sites focus on breadth and offer a massive database of fashion items, typically imported by the community or a developer scraping the web. Polyvore, for instance, is updated with over two million new items each month. 

But San Francisco-based Ajent feeds its users just one “look” per day. Sign up for free, and receive a daily email with trendy style suggestions, home decor options, and more.

Today’s look is “Emerald”; users can peruse a shortlist of affordable deep green shirts, a kimono, pants and shoes, and even plan a trip to the Emerald Isle.

Ajent’s founder Meghan Higney (pictured above) hit on the idea for the site when she was bedridden for several months after breaking her back. The former private equity professional said she felt “overwhelmed” by the clutter on the Web and yearned to have a personal style hunter to source the best deals, delivered straight to her inbox.

So Higney quit her day job to develop the site and daily newsletter. She tested the beta on 200 users — men and women — and brought on a team of five staff members, including a front-end designer and several fashion editors. Each day, Ajent’s human editors pore through magazines, street style blogs, arts and culture, and more for inspiration. 

Ajent is a bootstrapped effort, and the next step is to hire engineers to build an algorithm (inspired by Netflix or Pandora) to offer personalized style recommendations. This will differentiate it from sites like Stylefeed that help users curate fashion by searching for deals from their favorite designers.

“The really interesting piece will be when Ajent brings you items on a day-to-day basis that you have told us specifically to look for,” said Higney over coffee. Ajent will also be aware of users’ size, budget, and style preferences.

To make money, the team is also considering rolling out a concierge-style service. If you’re looking for a leather skirt for spring, an Ajent style hunter will source the best deal and style from the Web and offer suggestions for items that will complement the look. It’s a similar business model to Zirtual, a virtual assistant service that is growing quickly and recently raised funds from Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh, among others.

In the future, Ajent will also benefit from building its own buying and selling platform, so users won’t be redirected to an external site if they choose to make a purchase.

In a recent interview, Forerunner Ventures‘ founder and managing partner said the key for the next wave of e-commerce sites is to “focus on augmenting the traditional shopping experience.”

The good news for online retailers is that a third of shoppers plan to spend more, according to FatWallet’s consumer survey of 600 consumers across the U.S, while 54 percent are planning to spend the same amount. And most shoppers — 62 percent —  believe they’re going to get the best deals of the holiday season at the beginning of next week.

(One caveat on those numbers: they’re based on a subset of consumers who plan to shop on Cyber Monday, so they likely de-emphasize those with skinnier wallets to begin with. On the other hand, of those who plan to shop online this Cyber Monday, only three-quarters said they did the same last year.)

50% of people are looking for toy deals on Cyber Monday

But it’s a bit surprising to see what people are looking to buy on Cyber Monday. It’s not technology, at least primarily. Here’s what people will be shopping for next week:

• 70%: clothing deals
• 50%: toy deals
• 34%: appliance deals
• 32%: tablet deals
• 32%: laptop deals
• 26%: HDTV deals
• 23%: smartphone deals
• 26%: other deals

Clothing, toys, and appliances. Ignoring the fact that the main point of Cyber Monday is online shopping, there’s not a lot of technology showing up … especially the traditional technology purchases such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and home stereo systems.

Which I guess is the good news for online retailers: online shopping is now truly widespread.

photo credit: Kevin Marks via photopin cc, spieri_sf via photopin cc

When I first typed this company’s name into my search engine, porn showed up. Then I qualified my phrasing with ‘$40 million’, and I found what I was looking for.

Online fashion company Nasty Gal announced this significant second round of funding today, following on the [platform studded high] heels of a $9 million Series A that closed just 6 months ago.

The site is billed as a “global online destination for fashion-forward, free-thinking girls.” According to the mission statement, a Nasty Gal is the coolest girl in the room, rocking outré and unique outfits that capture attention. I am hesitant to self-identify with any moniker that includes “nasty”, but will admit that while researching this article, I fell in love with every item I saw.

It is the retail offspring of fashionista Sophia Amoruso, whose edgy taste has spawned a devoted following and wild growth. The company has experienced almost 400% year-over-year growth rate. According to Inc. 500|5000, it is one of the fastest growing private retail companies in the US.

On Nasty Gal, shoppers find a selection of vintage and non-vintage apparel hand-picked by a legion of style mavens seeking out original and provocative pieces. They search everywhere from flea markets to designer show rooms to create a diverse inventory that makes fashionistas everywhere salivate with desire.

Recently, Amoruso launched an in-house collection called Weird Science that draws inspiration from unusual sources, like 1980′s BDSM wear and computer files. A lifestyle magazine is in the pipeline as well.

Nasty Gal’s valuation is now set at $240 million and is projected to bring in $128 million of revenue this year. It has grown tremendously since its inception in 2006, when Amoruso began selling clothing on her own website instead of through eBay. Now, she has sold to around 400,000 customers in 60 countries and her site gets 5 million visits a month. The typical customer is an 18-24 woman who lives in L.A. or New York, but a third of the sales come from abroad, despite no direct marketing.

The company is based in Los Angeles. Amoruso relocated there from the Bay Area to be closer to her vendors and the fashion scene. Both rounds were led by Index Ventures, which also invested in Etsy.

With $49 million in the bank, the only kind of bootstrapping she needs to do is on the studded ankle kind.

That’s what new fashion rental startup Le Tote is offering young urban women. And the founders are hoping that women’s rich history of sharing clothes will make the company as successful as some other rental successes.

Netflix, anyone?

“Women only wear 10-20 percent of what’s in their closet,” co-founder Rakesh Tondon explains. “Most women have closets full of clothes they don’t wear.”

(Perhaps I’m way more metrosexual than I thought, or perhaps the problem is not limited to women.)

So Le Tote is trying to solve the problem of variety, without generating the bloat that spawns Hoarders-style rooms full of unused clothing. All while trying to fit inside the tight budgets of young urban women sans unlimited income.

Users sign up for Le Tote at a monthly rate of $49, then fill out a style profile. Le Tote’s stylists (and algorithms) take that profile information and select looks and fashions for you: three garments and two accessories. Then you receive a little Le Tote bag in the mail.

Source: Let Tote

Filling out your Le Tote style profile by favorite stores and magazines …

Just like the Netflix DVD rental business, you can keep the outfit as long as you want. Get tired of it? Send it back to get another one.

Women can send the totes back as often as they want. They can have a new outfit every weekend, and can make special requests, such as no earrings, just skirts, or no tops. But the styles are picked for you, kinda like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates.

The clothing itself is not brand name, nor, co-founder Brett Northart hastens to add, knockoffs on famous designer’s clothing. Instead, the fashion is under Le Tote’s own label and is sourced in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

“We’re buying from wholesalers and manufactures that supply the big boutiques in major cities,” Northart says.

Source: Le Tote

Same Le Tote fashions

And the obvious question about re-using clothing? Tondon says that’s actually not been a problem at all in their target market testing, as women “grow up sharing with their sisters and friends.” In addition, the clothing is laundered and checked for quality and condition after every use.

That alone might incentivize some women to buy more than one membership and give up doing laundry entirely.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fashion-forward types seem infatuated with photographing their outfits. You can scoff at the practice all you want, but the overwhelming number of fashion blogs tells us that sharing outfits is popular, especially in a world with Instagram. Cloth, an iOS app available since last December, goes a step further and catalogs your entire closet based on outfit pictures. Today, it adds weather-tracking features and photo filters to its app.

Cloth encourages users to snap a picture of their outfit each morning and add descriptions, such as clothing brand and style. As you snap pictures, the app gives you points and badges. Eventually, the goal is to catalog your entire closet with Cloth so you never again have to complain that you have nothing to wear.

Cloth is partnering with Weather Underground to connect your outfits with the weather outside. When you photograph an outfit, Cloth will automatically tag it with the current weather. Then you can go back later and choose a weather category to see which of your outfits will keep you comfortable based on the forecast.

Cloth is also teaming with Aviary to add fancy photo filters to the app, Instagram style. Outfit pictures are sharable on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Cloth’s free redesigned app launches today in the App Store (it used to cost 99 cents). The weather features and photo filters are available with an in-app 99 cent purchase.

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Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wants to see a picture of everything in your closet.

In return, he’ll give you badges and even discounts on clothing brands that you love.

He’s not a creep (as far as I know). Rather, his startup, RNKD (pronounced “ranked”), is gathering information about what brands people are loyal to, and using that data to provide better information to those brands while offering good deals to customers. RNKD enters beta testing today.

“What you have is a better predictor than what you say you want,” said Swinmurn in an interview with VentureBeat (see video above). In other words, you might say you want a nice Brioni suit, but if your closet is full of Mark Ecko T-shirts, the odds are pretty high that your next purchase will be at the mall, not Fifth Avenue.

So if the Mark Ecko company only knew what a loyal fashion victim you were, it could probably get you to buy even more stuff by giving you discounts or early access to new clothing lines.

Enter RNKD. Swinmurn’s goal is to collect as much information about what clothing people actually own, while rewarding them for uploading and tagging photos. Step two is to approach brands with that data and figure out how to make a business out of it, perhaps through advanced data analytics services or through e-commerce offers.

In the meantime, the site can build momentum by getting clothing brands to offer real rewards in exchange for demonstrations of loyalty from RNKD’s customers. You say you’ve got 20 different pairs of Adidas, and the photos to prove it? Adidas may very well want to offer you a coupon for your 21st pair at some point. As the company’s press materials describe it, RNKD is “the first universal loyalty program that creates a direct relationship between you and your favorite brands online.”

RNKD has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that no brands are likely to be interested in the community until it has a critical mass of consumers, yet consumers have no real incentives to open their closets to the world without real benefits. Swinmurn seems unfazed by this. Like FourSquare, RNKD is offering virtual badges as rewards for participation, making uploading into a competitive game. And, he points out, there are many sites where people already share information about what clothing they own, such as WIWT, Nice Kicks, Chictopia and Fashism, to name a few.

As someone who generally wears the same jeans three days in a row and can’t be bothered to shop for shoes more than once or twice a decade, I’m way outside of RNKD’s target market. And I’ll be honest, it seems like a pretty thinly disguised brand marketing scheme. Who is really so loyal to some abstract corporate brand that they’d be willing to share dozens of photos in hopes of getting some evanescent reward that just means you can spend more money on the same stupid corporate invention?

But Swinmurn might onto something, having made one of the most successful online retail operations of the last decade. He then followed it up with Dethrone, a small clothing brand focused on mixed martial arts fashion. Meanwhile, I spent the past twenty years working as a journalist. Clearly, he’s both a better businessman and far cooler than I am, and he’s probably a lot tougher besides, so who am I to say it’s a crazy idea?

Swinmurn, who is less well known than former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, started Zappos in 1999. He credits sheer, dogged persistence for making the company a success.

“Constant rejection was the only reason it worked,” he said, mentioning as an example the fact that it took seven years before Nike was willing to let Zappos sell its shoes. Only by going to industry trade shows year after year, learning the ropes and facing repeated rejections, was Swinmurn able to get traction for his online shoe business.

Based on that experience, he believes it’s better to build something real, then try to see if people want to buy it. Rather than raise a bunch of money on a speculative business plan, Swinmurn believes in just getting started and building something.

“People want to see something,” he said.

So perhaps, with seven years of dogged persistence, he may be able to build RNKD into something as successful as Zappos.

Due to the larger variations in the shape and size of the female body, the female FitBot robot was more complicated to accurately model than the male torso and took longer to perfect. Fitbots are available to match over 85 percent of female shoppers.

Clothing is currently the largest online retail sector, estimated to be worth $26 billion a year in the US alone. Yet only 7 percent of clothing is bought online. The fact that shoppers cannot try on clothing before purchasing results in a very high rate of returned merchandise (over 40 percent for some types of fitted clothing) and associated costs for retailers.

Female clothing tends to be more fitted and more varied than male garments. Based on personal experience, I know that it is very difficult to be sure an item bought online will fit and hang right. Hawes & Curtis has seen sales to new customers increase by 57 percent since the introduction of the male FitBot, and returns are at a record low of 2.99 percent. The impact on female shoppers is likely to be even greater.

Fits.me works with a German company called Human Solutions, which provides a database of the most common body dimensions taken from 3D imaging of tens of thousands of people. A selection of target shapes are chosen for the robot. Not every item of clothing in every size needs to be physically tried on the robot. Instead, sizing samples are put on the robot for each of the target body shapes, and the result is photographed. On average, you need 4 garments from a brand to establish the sizing. Big brands like Gap will have 10-15 fit samples. Most clothing brands have 4-7.

When a shopper wants to see a size on her own body shape, mathematical algorithms are used to manipulate the most similar image of the robot. This is combined with information about the physical properties of the garment and how it takes on shape (some materials are more clingy or stretchy than others) to show the shopper a simulation of the garment on her own body shape.

Fits.me doesn’t seem to have any direct competitors, although there are plenty of companies that provide styling or sizing advice and virtual dressing rooms of various types. Based in Estonia, Fits.me launched in May 2009 and has raised a total of 2.3 million EUR ($3.32 million) from the Estonian development fund and private investors.

Thredup, an online exchange for children’s clothes, just announced that it has raised $7 million in a second round of funding.

The site is aimed at parents who want to find a more economical/less wasteful way to update the wardrobe after their children have outgrown their clothes. So if you’re looking for new clothes, you can go to the site, browse different boxes based on clothing type, brand, size, and so on, then choose the box you want. In return, you need to pay $5 (plus shipping costs) and add your own box of clothes that your child doesn’t wear anymore to Thredup’s listings.

The San Francisco company launched about a year ago. Thredup says its users will swap their millionth item sometime this month and that 1,000 new moms are joining the site every day. The new funding will be spent on improving the core product and also adding new swap items like toys, books, and maternity items. (Update: Thredup says that it has a section for swapping toys, books, and media that’s live right now.)

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Trinity Ventures and former eBay CEO Brian Swette. Thredup has now raised $8.7 million.

The Dutch startup uses co-browsing technology to share the screen between multiple shoppers who can put together different pieces and discuss their choices. The idea is to simulate online the real-world experience of a group of women shopping together.

The consumer web site offers items from 50 online shops in the US, UK, Germany and France, including French Connection, My Wardrobe, Karen Millen, Mango and other well-known European high-street brands. Users can invite friends to a shopping session via Facebook or a URL.

The target market is women aged 15-45. Personally, I can’t see many 30 something women finding the time or inclination to organize a live shopping session, but it could be a hit with teenage girls.

Co-shopping might work best as a feature in existing online shopping portals, rather than as the focus of a new one. Accordingly, ShopWithYourFriends offers a B2B, white-label version for online clothing retailers. Retailers can integrate ShopWithYourFriends into their website by embedding a small piece of code.

The parent company of ShopWithYourFriends is ChatVenture, which is based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, has eight employees and is privately funded. The company was founded in 2008.

Currently, Fits.me only provides male robot mannequins, but a female version should be available by the end of the summer.

Fits.me is one of the 20 (mainly European) startups pitching in TheNextWeb conference startup rally in Amsterdam this week. The company started a year ago in Estonia, and the robotics technology comes from Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology. The mannequin robots can take on up to 100,000 different body shapes, but in practice many fewer than this is needed, since human beings tend to come in a more limited range of shapes and sizes.

Fits.me works with a German company called Human Solutions, which provides a database of the most common body dimensions taken from 3D imaging of tens of thousands of people. A selection of target shapes are chosen for the robot. Not every item of clothing in every size needs to be physically tried on the robot. Instead, sizing samples are put on the robot for each of the target body shapes, and the result is photographed. On average, you need 4 garments from a brand to establish the sizing. Big brands like Gap will have 10-15 fit samples. Most clothing brands have 4-7.

When a buyer wants to see a size on his own body shape, mathematical algorithms are used to manipulate the most similar image of the robot. This is combined with information about the physical properties of the garment and how it takes on shape (some materials are more clingy or stretchy than others) to show the user a simulation of the garment on his body shape.

In a trial with a German retailer, Fits.me increased sales 3 times and reduced returns by 28%. The company just signed UK shirt maker Hawes and Curtis as its first commercial customer. Fits.me gets a percentage of revenue from sales.

The company doesn’t seem to have any direct competitors, although there are plenty of companies that provide styling or sizing advice (see figure to the left). Based in Estonia, Fits.me launched in May 2009 and has funding of 1.3 million euros via a combination of EU research grants and private funding.