Allison Beal bustled around downtown Los Angeles one recent Tuesday morning to source fabric for a dress she recently designed. She picked out the accompanying buttons and had them dyed to match.
That might be a standard day for a fashion designer, but Beal is the chief executive of a technology company.
She runs StyleSaint Inc., an online community of fashionistas who share their favorite trends and create digital fashion magazines. But the Venice startup expanded from technology to textiles earlier this month and began selling its first line of clothing, hence the need for fabric and buttons.
If it seems that StyleSaint is doing the opposite of what other online retailers have done, that’s because it is. The common e-commerce model – think ShoeDazzle or BeachMint – has been to create a product, find a celebrity to attach to the brand and then hope that customers go to the websites and open their wallets each month.
But Beal said she wanted to develop the audience first and then make the products that they would want to buy based on their posts.
“It was scary to me to just build a brand and hope people would come,” she said. “You have to have people who have a vested interest in it.”
StyleSaint launched in May last year as a digital bulletin board for the fashion-minded. People could post photos that they call “tear sheets” showing their favorite styles and then create digital magazines showcasing a certain trend. Beal also began emailing a twice-weekly fashion magazine to members. The community has since grown to more than 110,000 magazine subscribers; 45,000 active members; and about 430 people who contribute photos to the site.
Those members are the target audience for StyleSaint’s first 18-piece collection. Beal pored over tear sheets posted to the site to understand the styles and trends that the community liked best.
Investors like StyleSaint’s online community – the company raised $1.5 million last year from Menlo Park’s Andreessen Horowitz and others. And they’re even more enthusiastic about the prospect of turning those members into paying customers: StyleSaint last week announced an additional $4.3 million series A round to design its collection. The money came from previous investor General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge, Mass., and e.Ventures in San Francisco.
Since StyleSaint has an established community, it has to do very little legwork to get its clothes in front of potential buyers. That could be key to the collection’s early success, said Mark Douglas, chief executive of Culver City marketing technology firm SteelHouse Inc. that works with e-commerce clients.
“If StyleSaint nails the product side of this, the community is potentially a huge deal for them,” he said. “They are starting out with a couple hundred thousand people ready to buy what they have. But they have to produce a product that people want.”
Small batches
StyleSaint quietly launched the first six pieces of its clothing collection at the beginning of the month. The line includes a maxi dress in black satin, skirts in bright silks and matching sleeveless blouses. More pieces appeared online the following week. And the collection’s final pieces are to be released at the end of the month.
Instead of following the monthly schedule that subscription e-commerce companies use to keep customers coming back, StyleSaint plans to launch all of its collections like the first: a new collection will hit the Web about every four to six weeks and new pieces will be released weekly.
Beal said the company sold out one of its styles within a week. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the line is a moneymaker. StyleSaint’s pieces range in price from $30 to $200 and are manufactured in microbatches compared with the volumes produced for, say, Nordstrom.
Production was limited to 15 units for one piece, a tank top in a blue patterned silk. The company only manufactured 50 units of the black maxi dress.
Martin Hughes, a partner at Moss-Adams in Westwood who works with the apparel industry, said it’s difficult to make money producing on such a small scale.
“It’s unusual in this industry to be able to produce small quantities at lower prices,” he said. “When you do it like that you can keep control over everything, but I would imagine it would be hard to make money doing it at this level.”
Hughes points to the fact that few manufacturers are willing to process such small orders without raising their prices.
However, StyleSaint has gotten around this problem by working with downtown L.A. manufacturer SSI Apparel, which also produces clothes for luxury brands such as James Perse and the Row.
And by cutting out intermediaries, such as store buyers, and selling direct to consumers, StyleSaint said it is able to sell products at margins between 40 percent and 60 percent, depending on the piece.
Also, the sales model allows StyleSaint’s clothes to retail at more affordable prices. Beal said one of the company’s $158 dresses could be marked up to $500 if it were sold at a boutique.
Brian Garrett, StyleSaint’s president and chief operating officer, said the company plans to establish a slate of basics that will be produced in standard fabrics and sold at higher margins. Every collection also will feature a few eye-catching pieces that are expensive to make and produced in only small numbers.
“We needed to launch with a line that grabbed people’s attention,” said Garrett, who is also a managing director at Santa Monica tech investment firm CrossCut Ventures. “But over time we hope to create pieces that will be the core of a woman’s closet. That’s where the scale will come from.”
Quick turnaround
StyleSaint’s entire process – from sketch to final product – takes anywhere from three to eight weeks, a fraction of the time that it can take fashion houses to stock their designs in stores. The company has seven employees and works with freelancers for sewing and pattern making.
The quick turnaround gives Beal the flexibility to alter the collections as she goes.
After launching the first six pieces of the collection, for example, she noticed that small sizes were selling the fastest. So she adjusted her order for upcoming pieces to add more smalls.
“I keep calling it a ‘responsive design house,’ ” she said. “We see what people are buying and then iterate on the next project you see in the online store.”
Beal and Garrett see the StyleSaint shop becoming the company’s focus. They will continue to mine the community for inspiration, but they expect the magazine to become a means of promoting new clothing lines and providing tips for how to style each piece.
If that happens, StyleSaint will have merged e-commerce and online content in a way that has proved elusive for several other fashion sites.
The best comparison could be Nasty Gal, a downtown L.A. purveyor of edgy, body-baring styles. The site frequently updates with new photo spreads and blog posts.
But even Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso didn’t venture into designing and manufacturing her own line until she had established a $100 million business selling other people’s clothes.
StyleSaint is hoping that its focus on editorial content and curated fashion will help the company develop the same devoted fan base that has helped Nasty Gal thrive.
“If you don’t have a unique point of view in e-commerce, you are going to end up in a commoditized business,” Garrett said. “That point of view is what has your user connect and want to come back. Then you don’t need millions of customers to be successful.”
