Online shopping is both a blessing and a curse to consumers. With everything from flash sale destinations to curated fashion sites, there seems to be limitless options for people who are keen on building their wardrobes. Online shopping is convenient — you can do it in your underwear or even while you’re sitting bored on your phone at the doctor’s office. But all too often, thanks to retail’s increased accessibility, we sometimes wind up buying clothes that don’t really go with anything we already own. We’ve even been victims of making the flash sale impulse buy, only to realize that we have nothing to wear with those silken butterfly print trousers we bought after returning home from a lively happy hour.
Live the Look is looking to change all that. The site wants to make sure that when you’re shopping, you’re buying things that will actually go with the clothes you already have. Much like Fab or Stitch Fix, the site quizzes you to determine your taste profile and offers you a curated selection of pieces you may like. The difference is that Live the Look works with items you already have in your wardrobe, and handpicks pieces that it thinks may go with them. The object isn’t necessarily to get you to buy more, or to make an impulse buy, the idea is to help you shop smarter — to help you make more meaningful purchases to add style to your wardrobe without having to forsake practicality.
Live the Look gathers a list of wardrobe staples every woman has — the LBD, a white T-shirt, a pair of jeans, a navy blazer, etc. — and lets you choose from the provided list of basics before asking you to describe your personal style. From this information, an algorithm is built, giving the customer a finely curated list of items that not only suits your sartorial proclivities, but you can also wear with the stuff you already have.
Live the Look has been around since 2013, but it just hired former Twitter fashion marketing executive Francesca Helina (one of the brains behind the social media’s promoted products feature) to help usher the site into its next phase. Before now, Live the Look mainly featured curated items from independent sellers. It’s now expanded its options through partnerships with retailers like Nordstrom and Target to offer a wider selection of brands through the site.
Though Live the Look is expanding rapidly, this is only a small teaser of what’s to come for the site. We chatted with Helina to get some more details about the company and how it’s expanding as it unveils its new platform.
theFashionSpot: So, you were brought on to revamp Live the Look. What’s changed since you’ve taken the reins?
Francesca Helina: We just recently relaunched with a much wider selection of items. We started back in December of 2013, the outreach was very much toward up-and-coming designers and brands. In the end, we ended up having 200 items on the site, which had a kind of artisan angle. However, it was very hard to get enough product. People were logging on to the site saying they wanted to see more, especially because everything on the site is so personalized, by closet item, by style, etc. Now that we’ve transitioned to the new system, you can see we now carry a very large selection of brands and a wider selection of shoes, handbags, clothing, etc. We pretty much quadrupled the number of items we have on the site and continue to add at least 50 to 100 per week depending on how we grow.
