Two college students develop an app to help people take even more selfies, in the name of friends helping each other decide what to wear. Here, Kate Carrara, COO of Dress’d, talks about the development of the platform.
One day in a dressing room…
Dress’d was an idea born out of a common situation that people find themselves in:
clothing uncertainty and trying to decide what to wear and what to buy. Ryan Siney, the CEO and founder, dreamt up the initial idea for the app while shopping for shoes. He couldn’t decide which pair to buy and didn’t have an effective outlet to share his clothing options with his friends, as he wasn’t going to post a pair of shoes on Instagram or Facebook. The initial idea for Dress’d was born.
The problem we’re solving: photo sprawl
With some market research, and over the course of working with our
developer and with testers, we realized that many people regularly take outfit photos, but that these millions of photos are spread out over different social platforms, or more often, simply stored in a person’s camera reel. Thus, we decided to move the app from a simple outfit-decision-making platform to an outfit sharing platform, where both men and women could unabashedly share all of their latest clothing, outfits and looks.
Your own, organized “look book”
You take photos or upload photos from your camera reel and upload them onto the Lookbook (or home page) for all of your friends to see, similar to the Instagram home page. So the main purpose of the app is simply to share outfit pictures. The app allows for style selections, browsing through brands and other fashion/outfit specific features. There is also a feature when posting an outfit to post it permanently or to select an expiry time. Selecting an expiry time is basically the equivalent of posting onto the wall to get feedback within that period of time, so your outfit moves to the top of the Lookbook and all of your friends receive a notification when you select this option. This feature is used when you are making an outfit decision such as what to wear or what to buy. Selecting no expiry time is the same as posting like normal on another social media platform.
Changing course along the way
Every feature, from the brands to the way photos are posted, is tailored (excuse the pun) toward outfit sharing. This meant adjusting the path of development, and integrating new features and branding. I was heavily involved in changing course, implementing new features, from the Style Tabs to the Style Filters and bringing my marketing creativity to numerous aspects of Dress’d, from the name of the company, to the name of features such as the LookBook, to logos and icons. I was also involved in facilitating development and testing with our initial test group, and am currently involved in everyday operations and marketing activities.
We envision a world where friends help friends get dressed!
We believe this app is going to be hugely popular, and the initial response we have received from early outreach and marketing has been encouraging. While Instagram and Facebook are photo sharing platforms, and both have people posting outfits to a degree, Dress’d aims to be the place to post outfits.
It has been an exciting journey from idea conception up until this point. Ryan approached me very early on, before any development took place, for my creativity, as I had helped him before with certain creative marketing tasks for other ventures he had worked on. I am not a technical entrepreneur, but I was able to help design the front end UI elements and the prototype app.
This initial creation excited us and encouraged us to continue and find a developer for our team. Over the course of development the anticipation and the worrying whether the app will come out looking the way you want sort of ebbs and flows. We have reached a point now where we are excited and proud of the platform we are releasing.
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About the Author
Kate Carrara is in her final year of college as marketing student at Eastern University in St.
David’s, Pennsylvania. She is the COO of Dress’d Inc.
