Other walls feature blown-up images of fashion accessories, while one in the foyer is inscribed with the words "delight the user. The users are certainly delighted. Polyvore is their fashion magazine and corner boutique rolled into one, and users are reading to the tune of 20 million visitors per month.
They're buying in sufficient quantities that Polyvore turned profitable in and more than doubled revenue last year. Lee is impeccably dressed a chic black dress, but so are many others at Polyvore HQ. Lee says she's "way down in the twentieth percentile" on the company's best-dressed list.
Standing in the sea of green, Lee admonishes her staff to "pretend you like working here. It's been quite a ride. Polyvore awakened Lee's artistic streak, and she fast became a "hopeless addict," as she puts it, making sets, pelting the company with feedback and, within nine months of her first visit, joining up as a full-time staffer.
In the ensuing five years, Lee has done everything from writing code to selling ads to staffing entire divisions. After becoming CEO, Lee assigned herself a new mission, one she is attacking ferociously this year: to help Polyvore's super-users rise from the ranks like she did and open boutiques, collaborate with designers, take prominent seats along fashion runways, and even launch their own clothing and accessory lines.
Along the way, Lee hopes to turn Polyvore into a force in both technology and fashion — the cultural influence of Vogue paired with the scale and reach of Google, proof that members of an online community can supplant entrenched tastemakers, not to mention startup CEOs. View Iframe URL. Polyvore began with a humbler mission: help two people redecorate their home. Company co-founder Pasha Sadri was outfitting a new house with his wife, clipping furniture images from magazines and assembling them into inspiration boards.
Sadri, a Yahoo employee, realized it would be much easier to assemble these collages digitally. Pipes included a drag-and-drop editor that Sadri realized he and his wife could use to place pictures of bathtubs and faucets next to one another in order to see how they paired.
At Yahoo, Sadri was regarded as a wizard, having racked up 19 software and user-interface patents. At coffee, Lee remembers Sadri arriving in a giant orange puffer jacket. Sadri was itching to strike out on his own. Sadri chose fashion for his first adaptation, reasoning that it would draw more repeat visits: Most people complete only a handful of home makeovers in a lifetime, but revamp their wardrobes constantly.
Just a few months after launch, Sadri received a pointed email from a hardcore user, praising the site as "the Flickr of fashion" before launching into a lengthy critique. Super-user Jess Lee had a lot to say. Sadri immediately invited Lee to meet for coffee. But the pair found they were in sync about how to improve Polyvore. Lee was obsessed with Polyvore because it allowed her to rearrange outfits and art drawn in the style of Japanese Manga comics, an abiding passion.
So does eating junk food. Design Co. Design These striking maps depict the invisible—and devastating—impacts of climate change Co. Design From leaky windows to building codes, this is how the infrastructure bill will tackle buildings Co. Design How the metaverse will change transportation as we know it. The future is flexibility. I could see the move pushing them into a completely different genre in addition to taking on a whole new set of competitors like StitchFix, a company that seems to be moving more in the direction of private label opportunities over curated third-party vendor styles.
This is a great post! This makes me more optimistic about other incumbents gaining a foothold in the space in the meantime. This is a very interesting topic and post. I actually first became introduced to Polyvore through Pinterest, which are high quality, and have very strong engagement stats — clearly they are doing a fabulous job through this social media channel. In that, I am skeptical about how the company intends to leverage other social media channels in a way that effectively aligns with its value prop the way Pinterest can.
I am also curious about what you think Polyvore should do next to lock in its position as a winner for the long-term. You must be logged in to post a comment.
Skip to content. The HBS Digital Initiative brings together perspectives across disciplines to help people understand how technology is transforming organizations and the greater world. Want to learn more about technology and organizations? Email Password Remember Me Lost your password? Assignment: Digital Winners and Losers. Previous: Viber: Who needs a cell phone plan anyway?
Next: Michael Page Recruiting — Do we still need headhunters?
0コメント