TheFashion.com aims to simplify online fashion shopping

With the post-Christmas promotional shopping craze in full swing, more and more UK shoppers are opting to browse the sales online this month. But with so many deals on thousands of clothing items offered online, it can be extremely time consuming and frustrating for some shoppers to find the perfect spring jacket.

To help solve this problem, there is TheFashion.com, the search engine devoted to bringing together the best women's wear brands, designers and retailers on a single online platform. “The idea for TheFashion.com was born out of pure frustration at how boring and time consuming it is to shop online,” explains Kasper Vardrup, co-founder and chief executive officer.

“If you observe most online shoppers in action you will see that they have a number of windows open, they use sale alerts, check google and their emails and it is not a very smooth process.” Launched last May, TheFashion.com aims to streamline the process of online shopping by aggregating a multitude of online fashion retailers and labels, whilst giving users the freedom to cross-shop hundreds of thousands of items.

“There are also many fashion products online - there are millions and millions out there, brands and thousands of retailers too, which means it can be difficult to find that particular dress, in a size large which you may be looking for,” adds Vardrup. “Today the majority of people just go to Google and search the name of the brand they are looking for and then results may come in from all over the globe. Ultimately you may end up on an online store that does not even ship to the country you are living in. There is a lot of complexity involved in what should be very simple task.”

TheFashion.com focuses on simplicity, curation and personalized shopping

To further simplify the task of online shopping, the London-Copenhagen based website also allows its users to create wishlists of items they like from their favorite designers, informs them when an item is sold out at a particular retailer and lets them create sale alerts for their favorite brands or products. "What makes fashion e-commerce different from other sector, such as travel or electronics, is the amount of products and the lack of unique product identifiers. This makes it a lot harder building an effective aggregator."

TheFashion.com works together with several established online retailers such as Asos, FarFetch, Mytheresa.com and the Outnet, as well as hundreds of designers and independent etailers to bring their users the best the fashion industry has to offer. ​ “There is definitely a line which we have on our site concerning the brands we feature, with focus on the medium to higher end market,” points out the CEO.

“The very low end of the market and private labels of the world are not featured on our site. If you look at cheap, private labels, the entire buying process an online shopper goes through is completely different. They would just go to a site like Zalando for example and enter the minimum and maximum they want to spend and search from there. That does not really fit with our business model.”

Although some crtitics may think the site may be missing out by staying clear of value retailers and labels, the responses Vardrup and the rest of the team at TheFashion.com have received since the launch beg to differ. “We have received extremely positive reactions from our users,” notes the co-founder. “We spend quite a lot of time speaking to our users and monitoring how they behave online on the platform, which is key to building a successful consumer product.”

Drawing hundred of thoundsand visitors per month to the site, the majority of the site’s users are coming from three main geographies; the US, the UK and Scandinavia, which are the primary markets theFashion.com is focusing on. However, the fashion search engine is poised for further growth as the company received 1.7 million dollars in venture capital last November.

The funding has been used to expand the site to additional countries in Northern Europe and the continual development of its algorithms to compete against larger fashion-aggregating competitors. “I think the UK and the US markets are crowded with services that may not necessarily target the same problem, but target an aspect stemming from the problem in a different way,” explains Vardrup.

“But if you looks at the majority of the markets in Europe, there is no one doing there what we do or working with this, so the lack of competition is a factor behind our expansion in Northern Europe. We have decided to focus on slightly smaller markets, such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, before expanding into larger ones as gathering local data before entering a new market is critical to our success."

"We need as much data as from local retailers and labels in order to develop an effective consumer product, which is why we follow a country-by-country expansion plan. We have also been targeting markets with a highly developed e-commerce sector, to ensure our site gets the most traffic possible."

"In addition, we aim to continue developing our site and launch it on as many devices as possible. Currently we have our website which can be viewed on mobile, but we are working on app as well," adds Vardrup. "It is a no brainer decision for us, as close to 50 percent of our traffic already comes from mobile devices and that share is growing every quarter.”