Show HN: Boutine - From Goldman Sachs to Women's Fashion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Boutine - From Goldman Sachs to Women's Fashion

boutine.com

17 pointsadambarber23 comments

Reading the name, I immediately thought of Poutine.

What else was the name a play on, aside from 'Boutique'?

Boutique + magazine.

I had to read it twice to not see Poutine.

Looks pretty cool, out of sheer curiosity though, what is the female/male ratio in at this startup? Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder what more women in tech/startups would create. This seems like an ingenious use of social+fashion to me.

Good question about the ratio. In the office right now, there are 3 men, and 7 women. Boutine was founded by guys, but the key branding and merchandising decisions are made by women.

I totally agree with you though - more women in tech is a good thing!

Are product reviews on the roadmap somewhere? I'm in your target demographic (I think), in that I'm female and regularly buy stuff on Etsy and Gilt/MyHabit. However, I think there's a huge barrier to buying from you right now. Namely, there's no brand recognition, so I can't base judgments off that, and I have no secondary way (like product/boutique reviews) to gauge quality.

That's definitely in the roadmap for the near future. Would you mind discussing a bit more over email? My email is adam@boutine.com

Thanks!

This site also looks like it was made by a couple of men. Specifically, the current layout/content, with the exception of the inventory itself, looks like it could be recycled for any number of online stores. There's nothing on the site that screams "we love fashion", and you might as well be selling electronics.

Maybe if you had some featured pieces with an explanation of how they fit into current trends, e.g. "Color blocking is really hot right now, so check out these shoes and dresses.", you'd more effectively create a fashion-specific brand.

Another thing you could do is, for each designer, show any press they've received right out of the gate. You say your designers have been featured in Elle etc, but I have no idea which designers they are.

Too bad http://www.styleowner.com launched like 1.5 years ago.

Style Owner was definitely an inspiration for us when we started -- I think they're a great site.

The biggest difference between us and them is how we get our products. Each of the designers is hand picked for the site, whereas they partner with major retailers and pull in products from there. In that regard, our catalogue is growing MUCH slower, but we think the careful focus on finding designers our users will love and can connect with makes a huge difference.

Do you think there might be any potential problems considering even your taglines are practically identical? "Build. Share. Earn." vs "Style. Share. Earn."

Flagged. How is this relevant to hacker news? Looks, feels and navigates like any ol' ecommerce fashion site. Is there anything technically interesting about this? If so, can you blog about that and then let the curious browse your homepage instead of just linking to the home page directly.

It seems like high school & college girls would go bananas for this. They'd get to peruse clothes all day and try to make money? The right in on Facebook or Twitter seems like it would go a long ways.

We've integrated with Facebook's Open Graph so we've got a pretty good idea of demographics, and high school/early college are the most active on the social side of the site so far.

Interestingly enough, it's pretty popular in Eatern Europe as well. Women in Poland love discovering fashion.

Adam here - one of the co-founders. I'm happy to answer any questions that any one has!

What was your role at Goldman? IB Analyst? Ops? Did that experience help you with starting this business?

Did you have programming/web design skills beforehand or did you join up with a technical co-founder? How did you guys meet?

Thanks

The following is from Pramod (CEO/other co-founder, since he can't comment for some reason...)

Yeah, I was an IB analyst for 2 years. After that switched over to the investing side spending a few years focusing on consumer internet and software companies. Both of these experiences definitely helped me with starting a business. You come across so many different entrepreneurs and business models that you get a good feel for what works and what doesn't work. Granted, every company is completely different and most of the things that work for one company don't work for others, but it just gives you a lot of insight and learnings. You also get an inside look at what investors look for and struggle with in terms of business models and teams which is helpful.

I did not and currently do not have programming or web design skills and it took a really long time to find the right partner to join the business. I started out getting the product outsourced and when I had something presentable, I started getting a lot of interested from the developer community. I spent a lot of time going to meet ups and other events to connect with developers. We met at one of the events, but stayed in touch regularly over a few months. We both had very similar visions for the business and the product and really seemed to work well together. It took a lot of time, but now we have a great team in place that we are both extremely happy with.

Thanks for the reply. Its great to know that networking and meeting developers at meet ups can lead to partnerships. I will be looking out for these events in my area. I'm working as a IB analyst at the moment, so I'm always a bit worried about meeting the tech side. Thanks!

Why is it important that the founder is from Goldman Sachs?

I'm especially curious because GS is mentioned in the title of the post, which suggests it must be important to the poster and perhaps relevant to HNers.

When we talk to people about the company, the finance to women's fashion part of the story always generates a lot of questions. If other people here are in a similar spot (thinking about making a big industry change for their startup) I wanted to make that known in case they have questions as well.

Will it ever be possible to import my Svpply feed and distribute those into collections? It'd also be nice if there were some grid presets for creating a new collection, since how someone organizes/presents their set has a lot to do with whether or not someone clicks on it.

We're actually working on tools for collection templates right now - not sure about an exact release date yet.

The svpply idea is interesting. We hadn't considered that! Thank you for the suggestion.

Thanks for the reply - those would both be really helpful!

Actually another question -- my boyfriend (http://www.lastplacefootwear.com) is currently trying to get a feel for what designs of his people are into before he sets out to spend money on production. Right now we're just building a voting-type system into his site, but is there any likelihood that your platform could assist in helping people determine market interest of their wares or will it always purely be for products that are already on shelves?

We're still in the early stages of product development, and all of our designers are hand picked. So we work with the designers we do have on board to give them insight in to how people are using the platform (what people are looking at, what people are sharing, etc...)

Outside of that, we don't have plans to expand to offer those tools to third parties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com