Miami-based startup FashMatch, which is currently in beta, is trying to make your fashion choices more social. Since its arrival six weeks ago, users have matched over 1300 outfits, and founder Jonathan Gheller plans to release the new version of the site on October 15th.
The idea is pretty simple: users can see how various items look together, publish their matches to the site and explore matches that other users have made. Items include skirts, dresses, tops, pants, shoes and bags (no clothes for guys yet), with the ability to filter by brand, style, price, fit and availability. Of course, you can then buy your outfit, with FashMatch pocketing the affiliate commissions. As far as the social features are concerned, you can link directly to a match from your blog, email it to your friends, rate matches by other users and view very concise profiles of other matchers.
Personally, I think the idea is great but the implementation is a letdown - the interface is odd, with the page refreshing every time you change something. What's more, it seems to create pop-up windows when they're not required, and they've made the images jpgs (most designers know that jpgs come out fuzzy when you use them for logos and the like). And despite being described by the founder as a "vertical social network", there really isn't much interaction between the users - members should really have full profiles at a unique URL, listing all their matches, their interests, the items on their wishlist and their overall rating as a style guru. In fact, the site would be better if it had been implemented more like the paperdoll site Stardoll, or some of the avatar creators like Meez, IMVU, WeeMee and Habbo Hotel (obviously without the avatar itself). Even so, just tidying up the existing stuff would be a massive improvement - I assume the new version will fix a lot of these glitches. What's more, all the initial feedback I've seen has been extremely positive: the target demographic could care less about how it works technically.
