Google Fashion Shopping Site Makes Debut

By CATHY HORYN Published: November 17, 2010 New York Times

YOU know how remote and strange the fashion world is when you go to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. For one thing, employees are zipping around the sprawling campus on scooters and bicycles, so that pretty much eliminates platform shoes and minis. And for another, there are way too many snack stations at Google. Fashionistas are funny about food.

The site allows shoppers to use the choices of prominent style makers as inspiration. Its developers expect most users to find their “style twin” and shop in that individual’s boutique.

In a deliberate collision between nerds and fashion mavens, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online. The site, Boutiques.com, which went live on Wednesday morning, may also change how people shop for clothes.

Boutiques.com has so many capabilities and components that even Google engineers have a hard time qualifying it. It is a collection of hundreds of virtual boutiques merchandised — or, in the new parlance, “curated” — by designers, retailers, bloggers, celebrities and regular folks. You can shop in the style of, say, the actresses Carey Mulligan or Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen — among the celebrities who signed up — or you can build your own boutique and amass followers who can comment on your taste.
It is a place, then, to show off your fashion acumen, much as millions of Polyvore users already do in their picture collages.

On Google’s new fashion Web site, visitors can browse boutiques created by designers, celebrities, bloggers and other users. Above, Carey Mulligan’s boutique.

It is also a source of inspiration. In every boutique on the site, there are dozens of additional choices inspired by a designer’s or celebrity’s style — generated by algorithms — with product photos that are much larger and sharper than on other shopping sites.
And if you don’t know how to wear the leopard pumps you just bought, there’s a panel of street-style photos on the right side of the site that visualizes the shoes in more expressive modes. Indeed, whatever style preference you indicate — classic, romantic, casual — the inspiration panel automatically adjusts for them, like a support group that can read your mind with surprising precision.
That may be Boutiques.com’s ultimate game-changer: how precisely it analyzes your preferences to give you what you requested. As many online shoppers know, search engines tend to give you stuff you don’t really want. A request for fern-colored shoes might yield fern shoes, plus fern-print blouses.
But, as two experienced online shoppers found when they tested the site earlier this week at Google’s New York office, if you ask for cobalt blue shoes, you get them. And if you refine your preferences with a click or two, you get even more specific styles.
The process at Boutiques.com is accomplished through visual search technology, and what style experts like Ms. Goodman and Ms. Holtz conveyed to Google code writers about the nuances of fashion — from color and pattern to silhouette and what looks good together and what does not.
The technology was actually developed by Like.com, a Silicon Valley company that was co-founded by Munjal Shah, which Google acquired last summer for a reported $100 million. Before the purchase, Like.com had created a number of fashion e-commerce sites, including Covet.com and the styling tool Couturious.com.
“I’ve always been impressed with Like.com,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, who is a vice president and retail analyst at Forrester Research and is familiar with the work on Boutiques.com. “I was just floored by the technology back then, and it’s evolved since. They’ve just honed the algorithm.”
Fueled in part by new gadgets like the iPad and more dollars spent by retailers on technology, online sales have generally outpaced brick-and-mortar sales. “I feel e-commerce in the last 12 months has caught a second wind,” Ms. Mulpuru said. According to Forrester, Internet sales of apparel and accessories this year will account for 14 percent, or $25 billion, of the $173 billion that Americans will spend online.
Mr. Shah is the team leader for Boutiques.com, with a left brain-right brain group of technicians and tastemakers. As he said in interviews conducted over the last week: “Online fashion shopping has to be universal and curatorial at the same time. This is an answer.”
A number of big companies, most notably Amazon and eBay, have been trying to get a bigger slice of the online apparel pie. But while they have improved the stylishness of their fashion pages, they may be ultimately constrained by their somewhat static platforms. It’s hard to mix DVD players and $900 Christian Louboutin peep-toe pumps.
Meanwhile, dedicated fashion sites like Shopstyle.com have gathered fans.