Yeh, but going for the large growth and taking huge amount of vc money is very risky since if the growth you dream of never come that vc money is a ticking bomb.
Retail clothing sales is well trodden ground. No one is inovating, everyone who survives just executes better than the other guy.
Most of the startups I hear about aren't doing that either. The vast majority are slight variations on a theme where most of the supposed novelty is in the marketing — just like Nasty Gal.
They'll happily take my measurements, and let me call in for recommendations.
I do suppose the idea of giving personalized recommendations to lower spending groups might work though I bet that department stores do the same thing. I know that women's fashion websites tailor their experience to users already.
- Only high end stores do personal styling/personal shopping, whereas we have a range that suits all budgets.
- Styling in-store has a much more limited range, we have ~1500 brands.
- Going into a store, or chatting on the phone, is much less accessible than browsing a website (although obviously a trade-off on being able to try on the clothes right there, but we do free returns).
Is there any time limit on purchases? I'm not paid for a week, I wouldn't want to go through that signup process and have it disappear for whatever reason.
In my experience, most large fashion sites can comfortably run on a Magento instance with a fairly simple architecture, normally a small handful of load balanced PHP instances, with a dual read slave / master database configuration.
Fashion itself, however, is a much different beast, being cool, hip, whatever, it takes a lot of skill - to really understand your target market and sell them something they don't even know they want yet.
Source: I'm a software engineer who has previously worked for www.missguided.co.uk, www.jdsports.co.uk, www.boohoo.com and currently works for www.countryattire.co.uk
Nothing new, investors threw money at a bad idea, business failed.
So, how about lunch?