What's This?
2013-10-22 12:14:56 -0400
StyleSaint, an Los Angeles-based apparel design and retail company, has an unusual origin story. It did not begin with an apparel product: Rather, it started as a community-driven self-publishing platform, inviting Internet users to create their own online magazines, or "tear sheets," with inspiring imagery that they could then embed on their blogs or share on social media. Months later, StyleSaint's founder and chief designer, Allison Beal, used those early tear sheets to inspire her first collection — a collection she could be confident would appeal to StyleSaint's passionately style-driven community.
Today, Beal continues to create monthly collections from the tear sheets built on StyleSaint's website, offering them directly to online shoppers at prices ranging from $30 to $200. Brian Garrett, a longtime venture capitalist who serves as StyleSaint's president and chief operations officer, says he believes the fashion industry's top-down approach, in which a designer dictates styles that are then purchased or rejected by consumers, is a "broken system." By tapping the customer in the beginning of the design process — and offering it directly, without standard retail markup — StyleSaint believes it's offering fashion it knows its customers want at wholesale prices. Aesthetically, Garrett likens StyleSaint's clothes to Rag & Bone and ALC, but at a quarter of the price.
It's a compelling narrative, but not entirely accurate: Designers and retailers are in constant communication with their customers, both on an individual and Image: StyleSaint
Topics: Business, Fashion, Mashable Videos, retail, Scaling Smarter, Startups, StyleSaint
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