Show HN: Boutine - From Goldman Sachs to Women's Fashion

https://www.boutine.com

by adambarber • 14 years ago

17 23 14 years ago

boutine.com

adambarber10• 14 years ago

Adam here - one of the co-founders. I'm happy to answer any questions that any one has!

lix23332• 14 years ago

What was your role at Goldman? IB Analyst? Ops? Did that experience help you with starting this business?

Did you have programming/web design skills beforehand or did you join up with a technical co-founder? How did you guys meet?

Thanks

adambarber10• 14 years ago

The following is from Pramod (CEO/other co-founder, since he can't comment for some reason...)

Yeah, I was an IB analyst for 2 years. After that switched over to the investing side spending a few years focusing on consumer internet and software companies. Both of these experiences definitely helped me with starting a business. You come across so many different entrepreneurs and business models that you get a good feel for what works and what doesn't work. Granted, every company is completely different and most of the things that work for one company don't work for others, but it just gives you a lot of insight and learnings. You also get an inside look at what investors look for and struggle with in terms of business models and teams which is helpful.

I did not and currently do not have programming or web design skills and it took a really long time to find the right partner to join the business. I started out getting the product outsourced and when I had something presentable, I started getting a lot of interested from the developer community. I spent a lot of time going to meet ups and other events to connect with developers. We met at one of the events, but stayed in touch regularly over a few months. We both had very similar visions for the business and the product and really seemed to work well together. It took a lot of time, but now we have a great team in place that we are both extremely happy with.

apitaru• 14 years ago

Why is it important that the founder is from Goldman Sachs?

I'm especially curious because GS is mentioned in the title of the post, which suggests it must be important to the poster and perhaps relevant to HNers.

mnicole2• 14 years ago

Will it ever be possible to import my Svpply feed and distribute those into collections? It'd also be nice if there were some grid presets for creating a new collection, since how someone organizes/presents their set has a lot to do with whether or not someone clicks on it.

adambarber10• 14 years ago

We're actually working on tools for collection templates right now - not sure about an exact release date yet.

The svpply idea is interesting. We hadn't considered that! Thank you for the suggestion.

pkrein• 14 years ago

It seems like high school & college girls would go bananas for this. They'd get to peruse clothes all day and try to make money? The right in on Facebook or Twitter seems like it would go a long ways.

adambarber10• 14 years ago

We've integrated with Facebook's Open Graph so we've got a pretty good idea of demographics, and high school/early college are the most active on the social side of the site so far.

Interestingly enough, it's pretty popular in Eatern Europe as well. Women in Poland love discovering fashion.

nchlswu• 14 years ago

Reading the name, I immediately thought of Poutine.

What else was the name a play on, aside from 'Boutique'?

adambarber10• 14 years ago

Boutique + magazine.

mitchty• 14 years ago

I had to read it twice to not see Poutine.

Looks pretty cool, out of sheer curiosity though, what is the female/male ratio in at this startup? Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder what more women in tech/startups would create. This seems like an ingenious use of social+fashion to me.

adambarber10• 14 years ago

Good question about the ratio. In the office right now, there are 3 men, and 7 women. Boutine was founded by guys, but the key branding and merchandising decisions are made by women.

I totally agree with you though - more women in tech is a good thing!

leeny2• 14 years ago

Are product reviews on the roadmap somewhere? I'm in your target demographic (I think), in that I'm female and regularly buy stuff on Etsy and Gilt/MyHabit. However, I think there's a huge barrier to buying from you right now. Namely, there's no brand recognition, so I can't base judgments off that, and I have no secondary way (like product/boutique reviews) to gauge quality.

adambarber10• 14 years ago

That's definitely in the roadmap for the near future. Would you mind discussing a bit more over email? My email is adam@boutine.com

Thanks!

leeny2• 14 years ago

This site also looks like it was made by a couple of men. Specifically, the current layout/content, with the exception of the inventory itself, looks like it could be recycled for any number of online stores. There's nothing on the site that screams "we love fashion", and you might as well be selling electronics.

Maybe if you had some featured pieces with an explanation of how they fit into current trends, e.g. "Color blocking is really hot right now, so check out these shoes and dresses.", you'd more effectively create a fashion-specific brand.

Another thing you could do is, for each designer, show any press they've received right out of the gate. You say your designers have been featured in Elle etc, but I have no idea which designers they are.

bherms2• 14 years ago

Too bad http://www.styleowner.com launched like 1.5 years ago.

adambarber10• 14 years ago

Style Owner was definitely an inspiration for us when we started -- I think they're a great site.

The biggest difference between us and them is how we get our products. Each of the designers is hand picked for the site, whereas they partner with major retailers and pull in products from there. In that regard, our catalogue is growing MUCH slower, but we think the careful focus on finding designers our users will love and can connect with makes a huge difference.

bherms2• 14 years ago

Do you think there might be any potential problems considering even your taglines are practically identical? "Build. Share. Earn." vs "Style. Share. Earn."

malandrew• 14 years ago

Flagged. How is this relevant to hacker news? Looks, feels and navigates like any ol' ecommerce fashion site. Is there anything technically interesting about this? If so, can you blog about that and then let the curious browse your homepage instead of just linking to the home page directly.

Show HN: Boutine - From Goldman Sachs to Women's Fashion

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