Back in December last year, we brought you news on fashion startup Mallzee, a recommendation app for iPhone that learns a user’s style and suggests clothes they might like to buy from the likes of Urban Outfitters, ASOS, Topman and French Connection. It adopts a familiar (to some) Tinder-esque swiping system too. Like something? Swipe to the right. Hate it? Swipe to the left.
Since we last caught up with Mallzee, the Edinburgh-based company has launched a version for iPad users too, but today sees the lid lifted on version 2.0, which heralds a handful of fresh features and general performance enhancements.
How it looks
As usual, you can set which brands you’re interested in most, but you’ll now see a new homepage that draws on infromation from fashion bloggers and stylists too.
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Additionally, you can also now set up Style Feeds, which are personalized streams of clothes tailored to your tastes. For example, you can create ones specific to ‘Going Out’, or ‘Going to Church’, if that floats your boat. You choose which items of clothing belong in there (e.g. ‘Shirts’, ‘Shoes’), colors, retailers, and price range – so everything that’s filtered into a specific feed meets the requirements you’ve set out.
Other new features included with version 2.0 are price drops, which alert you when an item of clothing you’ve ‘liked’ gets a, well, price drop. And you can also now share items in-app via WhatsApp, as well as Twitter, Facebook and email.
Looking good
The fashion-recommendation space has been heating up in recent times, with the likes of Looklist trawling the Web to garner garment inspiration, while the the more-established StyleUp and Thread are also making moves to help you dress better. However, Mallzee’s mobile-first approach, focusing on ease-of-use, could set it apart from the competition in the future, but it still has a long way go go.
For now, it remains largely UK-focused. But we’re told that plans are afoot to roll out a US version in October, as almost a third of its user-base is based Stateside. Crucially, Mallzee is also launching a version for Android in December which will open things up massively to a slew of new users, in addition to a fully iPad-optimized incarnation.
Looking a little further into the future, Mallzee CEO and co-founder Cally Russell says they’re aiming for 500,000 users before raising a Series A round in early 2015 – a follow-on from its £500,000 ($843,000) round last May. Then things could go mega, as they strive to become the “go-to shopping destination” for clothes on mobile by the end of next year, which means e-commerce functionality is on the radar too.
“The (fashion) space is interesting, but people are focused on niches or just on people who love fashion,” says Russell. “We think there is a wider market for people who want to look good but don’t want to spend huge amounts of time finding clothes and want to do it on the go.”
You can grab the all-new Mallzee iOS app now.
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