The Problem:
You don’t know what to wear. You don’t wear all of your clothes. There are few resources giving good suggestions for clothes you might like. Your outfits fall into the same routine. You need instant feedback on clothing choices. You don’t remember the last time you wore something.
There are many problems with clothing and wardrobe. Perhaps we can come up with a business to solve them all at the same time?
The Business
A service that catalogues every item of clothing you now own and continues to catalogue every item of clothing you will own in the future. You take a picture of your outfit everyday. Using this data, the service provides:
- The ability to know when you last wore certain items and certain outfits.
- Instant crowdsourced feedback on an outfit.
- A catalogue of your entire wardrobe.
- A listing of what you actually wear, ie your favorites.
- Suggestions for outfits you already own.
- Suggestions for items or outfits you should buy.
Doableness
This is big data meets the recorded life meets your closet.
- Hard part 1: You need photo recognition software that allows you to know what clothing items are being worn simply by taking a picture
- Hard part 2: You need a (relatively) easy way to catalogue all items in a wardrobe. It can’t take more than a few hours
- Hard part 3: You need software that can come up with recommendations – and match advertisers with that recommendation opening – seamlessly.
If you can do these three massively difficult things, all you need to do is put together a world class engineering team and a world class marketing team. This idea is barely doable. But it’s doable. And you have the real potential to get tons of users. The payoff makes this one worth it.
My Thoughts
What social media really wants is a window into the things that you actually do, actually like, actually talk about, and actually want to buy. The only problem is their window into you is through you. This idea gets you out of the way. “What is actually” is far more valuable.
This clearly might be an example of an idea whose time has not yet come. (Venture capitalists will tell you this is as good as failure.) But keep your eye on it.