GigaOM » Mike Hirshland

Shop Hers takes a stab at high-end digital resale

Eliza Kern — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:15:06 +0000

Jaclyn Shanfeld‘s venture into high-end fashion retail started where many women head when they’re ready to refresh their wardrobe — the consignment store. Having just quit her job at a model management firm but wanting to continue dressing stylishly in Los Angeles, she dropped off several thousand dollars worth of designer clothes at a consignment store. Several weeks later, she received a check in the mail for just $250.

“I literally feel taken advantage of,” she said. Shanfeld went on to try a variety of other options for resale, including eBay and Rent the Runway, but found that those options were either too expensive or inconvenient (some high-end Rent the Runway dresses can have long waits associated.)

“I came to this idea that I really just wanted to re-create what I had growing up, where I would buy a black dress from BCBG and it would be passed around and worn by ten of my girlfriends before it’s passed down to someone’s little sister,” she said. “But when your friends are grown up they have different body types and styles, and it doesn’t always work.”

So Shanfeld developed the idea of Shop Hers, which attempts to get high-end fashion to stop collecting dust in the closet and get it sold to others who might enjoy it. The company is attempting to re-create a luxury retail experience with online re-sales, and so far has impressive traction although it’s only been live about a month.

Shop Hers accepts only high-end women’s clothing (your brand must be listed on their site to sell), and the company vetts all clothing before it’s shipped out to buyers to be sure no fakes are sold. All items come with a return policy — if you buy something and find it doesn’t fit or you don’t like it, the company will refund your money and buy the item back themselves, charging just a five percent restocking fee — the seller won’t be forced to give a refund. Shanfeld said she thought it would be worth it for the company in the long run to offer a flexible policy, since women shopping online need guarantees.

Having a flexible return policy and a narrow focus on luxury brands is what’s going to set Shop Hers apart in a crowded area of fashion resale, along with the company’s effort to help women enter their exact measurements, and pair them with other sellers who size similarly. There are tons of sites doing fashion re-sale right now — Tradesy, Poshmark, Threadflip, and Twice are just a few — but none of those have the strict selling requirements that Shop Hers has.

“A lot of sites use the same thesis of luxery fashion merchandise, but then you find that it’s a lot of Gap and Forever 21 with one Louis Vuitton bag mixed in,” Shanfeld said. “That’s why we’ve spent so much of our time merchandising.”

And Shop Hers isn’t just a good idea and a website — it has the talent to back up its aspirations. Shanfeld’s creative director is Jenna Stahl, who used to manage the shopping experience on Nordstrom’s website, and her CTO is Thanh Khuu, who previously held the same role at ShoeDazzle. Shop Hers’ investors are just as notable: the company has backing from SV Angel, Ryan Steelberg, Paige Craig, Brian Lee, Jeremy Zimmer, Mike Hirshland of Resolute VC, and High Line’s Shana Fisher. Several of those, including Fisher and SV Angel’s Ron Conway, are investors in Pinterest.

The site launched in beta slightly more than a month ago, and Shanfeld said that so far, they’ve had more than 200 transactions, and every customer has gone on to buy a second item on the site — and the items are usually fairly high price points. The site was initially invite-only, but when it was working well and they were getting multitudes of emails from women asking to participate, Shanfeld said they decided to let everyone sign up.

“We decided, let the women have their Prada,” she laughed.

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Photo site Webshots comes under new ownership again, will re-launch as Smile

Eliza Kern — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:00:52 +0000

Believe it or not, Webshots, the photo company founded in the mid 1990s, is still hanging around, but soon its service will go by a slightly different name after another change in company ownership. Threefold Photos plans to announce Tuesday that it has purchased Webshots and will re-launch the product this fall, transitioning it to become a more modern photo experience called Smile by Webshots.

Threefold Photos (see disclosure below) has purchased Webshots from American Greetings for an undisclosed sum, and has taken investments from groups and individuals including Freestyle Capital, True Ventures, Chris Sacca, Biz Stone, Mike Hirshland, and others.

Smile will roll out a variety of features this fall, but core to the experience will be a photo stream aggregating user photos that are easily searchable and shareable, targeting a user demographic that might not always upload to Facebook or iCloud. However, it’s hard to say how a photo-sharing site can compete in the age of Facebook and Instagram, which dominate the photo upload and sharing experiences. Older photo sites like Photobucket and Flickr have certainly struggled to find new footing.

Webshots was founded in 1995, and by 1999 had moved the product into photo-sharing as well as the original screensavers and wallpaper. In 1999, the founders sold Webshots to Excite@Home for $82.5 million in stock. In 2001 Excite@Home declared bankrupcy, and the founders purchased Webshots back for $2.5 million. In 2004, CNET bought Webshots for $71 million, which sold it to American Greetings for $45 million in 2007. Former Webshots executives Julie Davidson, Narendra Rocherolle and Nick Wilder are now on the Board of Directors for Threefold Photos.

Beginning Tuesday, existing Webshots users will start receiving notices that their photos will be migrated to Smile, which currently has iPhone and desktop apps, with Android coming within a month. Rocherolle and CEO Mike Sitrin explained in an interview that they want Smile to be the easiest way to search and share photos, although they were light on specifics as they focus on transitioning existing users to the new service.

Disclosure: Threefold Photos is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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More Celebs, CEOs Want You to Vote

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:19:24 +0000

Oh wait. Zach Braff wants me to vote. Let me rescue my mail-in ballot from the recycle bin then.

Sigh. The one good thing about this election almost being over is that I won’t have to sit through any more insufferable celeb-studded videos reminding me of my civic duty.

This latest one is directed by Steven Spielberg and features Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. As if actors from your own country weren’t blowhardy enough, it also features Canadian Ryan Reynolds, Englishman Orlando Bloom and Kazahkstan’s famous fake reporter Borat.

Not to be outdone, a number of CEOs have formed their own voting supergroup video. Eric Schmidt, Donald Trump and John Chambers are among the bosses announcing that they are giving their employees one hour to vote. One hour? Obviously these CEOs have never ridden MUNI.

The CEO video is part of a Google-launched VoteHour.org initiative, which found (in typically Google-y fashion) that the No. 1 reason people didn’t vote in 2004 was because they were too busy. If I were a CEO, I’d be less worried about the time spent voting and more concerned about employees following the live election coverage all day.

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Will Activison-Vivendi Combination Bring MMOs & Consoles Together?

Om Malik — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:14:38 +0000

Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris Ventures, predicts that social gaming will become a standard feature of console games and MMOs. Moreover, he believes that the $18 billion combination of Vivendi/Blizzard and Activision might result in games “that are both MMOs and console titles. Nobody has yet done. And for good reason: it’s not easy.”

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