Next 36 Venture Blynk Launches ‘Tinder for Fashion’ App
Are you fashionably challenged?
Then you might want to check out a new app which launched today for Android users from Toronto-based startup Blynk that provides personalized fashion recommendations via a Tinder-like interface. (The app will launch for iOS next week.)
The app was inspired by co-founder Jaclyn Ling’s lifelong love affair with fashion. “She has been a fashionista ever since she was a kid. She ran her own fashion company as a student, generating over $10,000 in revenue and attracted over 10,000 followers to her own fashion Youtube channel,” says Susie Pan, CMO at Blynk.
According to Pan, the average personal stylist can cost more than $100 per hour. “Blynk replicates this value for users for free. Our team is united around the goal to show that looking and feeling good is easy. And we want everyone to be confident in his or her own style,” she says.
Blynk is tinder-link in design because it enables users to swipe right if you like a style, or left if you don’t. “Blynk learns about your style preferences, using machine learning and collaborative filtering, after users conduct 20 swipes. It then uses that information to recommend an outfit,” explains Pan. “Our CTO Shums Kassam is a master at machine learning and recently worked for a startup out of MIT.”
As users swipe left and right for outfit recommendations, what they like goes into a virtual closet within the Blynk app. Users can then buy the recommended clothing via the Blynk affiliate network. Or, they can use the images as inspiration to buy products in-store.
Pan says that the publicly launched app now offers a feature called “outfit builder” which enables users to build an outfit and then send it to friends to see what they think. “This is also a very useful tool for personal stylists,” she says.
During the beta phase, the Blynk app was tested by over 350 users to provide feedback. Pan says that those users have conducted over fifty-thousand swipes so far – swiping outfits over two thousand times daily.
The app is currently being tested in Toronto and New York. But the team has plans to expand Blynk globally in the near future.
