99Dresses (YC W12) wants to give women an infinite closet

I have read about relevant studies where people had an easier time surrendering things that symbolized money, even though they were perfectly equivalent, just as soon as they were removed from the actual physical currency:

"Dear Mark, Why is it that casinos use chips versus real money on most of their games? Dave M.

Because most players do not equate casino chips with real money. It is far too easy, Dave, to be caught up in the game and forget what you are actually betting. Chips possess none of the qualities of real money. A dollar has a more palpable feeling and is more difficult to surrender than parting with a casino chip. Real dollars evoke those hours of employment, mortgages, and dry cleaning bills. But once purchased, chips seem like fun tokens found at the fair, not a medium of exchange. That is why casinos prefer pit employees to "change color" or upgrade your chips. They are not being courteous, just trying to induce larger play."

source(down):http://www.markpilarski.com/column14-2.html

That system sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work. Even places where virtual currency doesn't buy anything tangible, such as MMORPGs, develop black markets rather quickly.

By using the buttons, 99dresses makes their system more fragile than necessary, and excludes people who could help build the community. Consider that most people won't need more than a few dresses worth of buttons. So someone who has 300 dresses has no incentive to upload them all to the site. Someone else has already pointed out that dresses need to be able to come out of the pool. Again that doesn't happen if money can't come back out. I might not even get to choose a dress I want if I'm worried that I won't be able to trade it again. The flow of dresses in and out is restricted, and that's not a good thing for the company.

Why not allow people to exchange buttons back for money, just at a lower rate?

The other side of the coin is that you don't pay shipping as a buyer, and it could also work as an incentive ('I've paid to get rid of my dress, I should now get one to make the most of my money')

Shipping labels is something I would pay a subscription for, as well as early access to newly received clothes. Try as hard as I might to buy beautiful things that should last me a lifetime, I am excited to try this service out. What will be the killer for me is the fit of the clothes. The real killer app that many are waiting for, is the ability to match an item to our figure and a get a real-time preview. I've seen suggestions of this at Siggraph but nothing consumer-ready.

>It would be a hell of a lot smoother if you would print out a shipping label from 99dresses which has the buyers address etc on it. The cost comes out of the buyers button credits etc..

And how exactly do you propose the company profiting off their own buttons? (Items in a database they can create at will)

Well that link just got mailed to everyone I know in West Seattle. Definitely more useful to my demographic than the product being discussed. :)

exactly what I came here to say.. What happened to all the virtual buttons? Whoever currently had a dress keeps it and those who didn't ended up with nothing? Or did she pay them out for their buttons?

'She says the site was so beloved in Australia that women still email her asking when it will be back up, “I’ve proven the model in Oz."' If it was proven in Australia, why shut it down? Did she need to shut it down for investors to take a look? Is there some YC criteria that wont let you have a successful product already?

I agree! Those prices are nuts. The really weird thing about them is the range -- I see everything from 4 buttons to 160! That makes me really wonder how they're set.

Even with the variation, the bulk of them appear to be $40 or more, which seems like a lot to me. If one is shopping used, pretty dresses can be had for under $10 at a thrift store. It makes no sense to pay so much for a dress I can't even try on first!

That's the problem with virtual currency like this, you have to create controls to address inflation and deflation, and certain groups of people always benefit from this.

I remember another site based around trading books that used a virtual currency, and a lot of the early adopters got free credits to help seed the system, while the late adopters could only get credits by sending books. It created an imbalance from the beginning.

Another issue is dealing with hoarders and retailers, which can damage the button system by putting too much virtual currency into the hands of only a few.

That seems to be how fashion-conscious women feel about new clothes. And fashion is a major channel of non-verbal communication about status/lifestyle/cleanliness/trendiness. While one may differ about it's philosophical value, it's certainly a market need and it has real use; Humans make snap decisions on appearance.

No more weird than the use in your profile: "the moderation system on HN is in dire need of an overhaul". In reality, nothing globally catastrophic will happen if either does not come to pass. Both are really more like "strongly felt personal preferences". Hopefully the usage makes more sense now.

I would say that the virtual currency solves that a lot.

This does seem like a bit of a problem, but I'd imagine the idea is you "re-sell" anything you no-longer want-- which may mean it didn't fit you right.

What it strikes me this business needs are small pre-paid boxes which will fit in US mailboxes or can be left for your mailman.

Maybe they could crowdsource this type of information.

"People who said this item fit well, also said these items fit well..."

I don't know if it's something that needs to be addressed. People who are more lenient are the target demographic more than people who would otherwise not rely on an online service.

EDIT: On an unrealted note, the name "Forever 21" is incredibly sad.

Roughly, "my measurements are X, and this item fit like Y" is how I would want it to boil down. I'm not sure it would go over if implemented just that way, but the idea is there somewhere.

Women tend to know their size within a given brand. As long as they stick to those, they'll be fine.

My guess: they haven't solved the "fit" problem, they won't bother trying (too hard), and it doesn't matter.

These dresses are equivalent to "found money."

Woman has a closet full of dresses. They're old, uninteresting, unwearable, etc. She posts them online, earns "buttons," and buys dresses that look like they might work. Some do, some don't. Net result: more dresses to wear.

Couldn't the system learn quickly? Like person A and B both wear a dress from person C. Now the system knows that person A could also exchange dresses directly.

Most of the women I know who are serious about their fashion are pretty certain when it comes to their size at a particular store. Sure a six isn't always a six. But a six at Forever 21 is usually consistent with other sixes at Forever 21. And they know their size at each particular store.

Rent-the-runway lets you select an alternate size in case the thing you receive just doesn't fit right.

Suggestion: measure the dresses.

Sizes in women's clothing have no objective standards at all (I do so envy men's pants, which come in 34x30 rather than Size 8 Slim Petite), but Kendall Farr opens her well-known book by suggesting that women break out the tape measure anyway. Measure yourself, and then measure anything you're thinking about trying on -- it saves time.

You just put it back into the system if it doesn't fit.

I had the same exact idea as you but unfortunately could not find the right technical co-founder. As some of the comments mentioned, most technical males do not get very excited when it comes to fashion :)

I think it can still be done though, so the best of luck to Nikki and all the other sites that are trying to solve this problem. It is a big market and someone is bound to find the right solution that will work for the masses.

True, but this site will actually help on that front. The site is a used clothing store that's trying to bypass the stigma attached to used clothes. They're harnessing consumers into a recycling program.

Some of it, but it's offset by the cost. Women will lend each other dresses quite often. My sisters-in-law are regularly around at our place borrowing clothes and bags from my wife.

Start your own?

I agree that this is a problem for men. However, I don't think a clothing exchange/rental is the way to go.

If I find a pair of pants or a shirt that fits me well and I enjoy, I will keep it and wear it repeatedly until it is too worn or stretched out.

In a lot of ways, that's the opposite problem form what this site is trying to solve.

99pants.com

I would like a suit service just like this.

I have been working on basically this same thing but for a wider audience for the last 3 mos. Unfortunately I am a solo act and only have evenings so everything takes 10x longer.

according to my partner who used the aussie version of 99dresses, this is indeed the case towards the end

It seems like if women really do have closets full of perfectly good clothing they don't like, there is value to be captured.

There's always stuff you can do like implementing user reputation systems, etc.

I think that you're onto something there. I need to wear a suit three times a year. Most of my friends are the same way. We all have a suit in our respective closets, but it's just taking up space for most of the year. Now, we're different enough sizes that we couldn't all just share one suit, but, if you had a few thousand clients, you could certainly send a fitting suit to the fellow who needs it, when he needs it.

There's also a huge boon to be found in having branches in both hemispheres. Instead of spending December paying the land tax on a warehouse full of shorts, just rent them out in Australia. Then, come July, send out the shorts in the US and the sweaters down under.

I'm not sure about the environmental impact. On the one hand, you have quite a bit of carbon footprint from shipping the clothes all around. On the other hand, the company would have a strong economic incentive to maintain the clothes. I'm betting a lot of clothes that are currently thrown away could be saved with proper cleaning and sewing skills. I'm now imagining reading the company's blog having less posts on Redis integration and far more on their new way to remove grass stains.

Honestly, given the sizing issues, this probably makes more sense for men's clothes, but that avoids competition with 99dresses.

Dammit. I'm going to be thinking about this all night.

I've been thinking about this exact idea for the past month or so and still love it. I recently tried Trunk Club, which is a similar service but they actually select the clothes for you and you only pay for what you keep and send the rest back. The inherent ownership problem still remains, though--there's yet one more pair of pants or shirt taking up space in your closet that you'll eventually get sick of (that and it was really expensive--like $175 for a button-down expensive).

I like the idea of having a somewhat curated selection of some top brands like Banana Republic, J.Crew, Gap, etc. and being able to choose a certain number of items to take out at one time. I'd pay upwards of $200/mo if it meant I had an endless rotation of new clothes to try on without having to keep. And if you like the garment? Feel free to keep it and pay retail.

The collaborative consumption model is disrupting industry after industry, and it's only a matter of time before someone gets it right in fashion. I would honestly consider starting this myself, but I just left a startup and joined the Goog less than a month ago--need some stability for awhile.

Well, they are the only .com domains that are pretty much left.

This site in particular has been around for a couple of years now, mind.

Rent the Runway stocks the clothes themselves while this and My Dress Affair (another competitor) are a peer-to-peer marketplace.

There's also the huge difference in that RTR specializes in designer clothing that is more for one-time-wear-only kinds of occasion that might warrant renting (I've done it a couple times for a wedding and a super formal dinner event), while 99dresses seems to be just selling run of the mill clothing I have in my closet with shipping potentially costing as much as what I paid for the dress in the first place just to sell it to someone else.

The fundamental idea of reselling used clothing is really cool and needs an overhaul from the usual Goodwill and other thrift stores, but 99dresses seems targeted at a specific audience that quite literally only wears something a couple times before tiring of it. I'm not sure how compatible that is with constantly changing fashions and questionable clothing quality from some of these clothing stores... I have a lot of old non-designer dresses I could be selling on this site, but after a couple times they've all got small problems (I don't want to sell something I mended!) or are out of fashion by a year or two.

Would you rather her buy new dresses? I definitely think this is a much better proposition

Why? Don't you want your wife to dress well?

The clothes people will be selling is probably stuff that has pretty close to zero value to the owner to begin with. Stuff they would have gotten rid of a while back if they'd just had the incentive to do so. For example I just packed up and donated two large bags of clothes charity, had this service been available to me I might very well have sent them some those items just to try it out. If it worked out well enough I think of a few more items I'd happily send off as well.

I agree. It shouldnt take more than 1 or 2 clicks for a user to review all your products. Ecommerce sites tend to not pay close attention to this - but look at how much significance Google pays to this metric.

There are infinitely many things that would improve the sales of an e-commerce site. First among all things is making sure the site is not on localhost.

Many sites do not implement view all or infinite scroll and, empirically, still manage to make quite a lot of money. One prominent example is Amazon.

More broadly, I would sincerely love it if HN did not try to play "Let's one-up the founders" on day 1 for every startup, with special attention paid to YC startups. All startups will have great big honking problems on day one. (They're more of the flavor "Nobody knows we exist" than "Our 100 products are paginated rather than on a single page.") The ones that succeed in solving those problems will, in the process, revisit almost every stupidly inconsequential implementation detail, in the same sort of painful, considered depth that all of us who have shipped software before know will eventually happen.

Wouldn't we be a happier, more productive community if the tone was less "I have found your flaw!" and more "That's a good start. You might consider adding X, Y, and Z to the roadmap. Those have previously had outcomes like X1, Y1, and Z1 when tried in circumstances X2, Y2, and Z2. X and Y can probably wait, but Z should be a fairly high priority because $EXPLANATION_OF_HOW_Z_PREVENTS_YOU_FROM_DYING."

A must? You clearly live in a different world from me, because in the one where I live, Amazon, eBay, NewEgg, Zappos and Etsy all seem to get by OK with paginated listings. I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a major ecommerce site with an infinite-scrolling interface.

Is this sarcasm?

While I'm all for equality of dress, pun intended, I doubt many guys would actually use this service even if society was fine with it.

That said starting with women and dresses and later expanding to guys, say for dress suits/etc.. wouldn't be a bad idea.