If you haven’t heard of Snap Fashion, you’re certainly more likely to now: the UK-based fashion startup Snap Fashion was the chosen as winner of yesterday’s Decoded London during Fashion Pitch, the first competition of its kind for emerging fashion and technology companies.
Impressing a panel of judges that included industry insiders from Topshop, Style.com and others, Snap Fashion scored $65,000 from Index Ventures. Here’s the allure: the web site and app are pushing ahead the idea of visual search by allowing users to find their favorite fashion items using images instead of text. Using the free iPhone app or a bookmarklet, fashion fans can add photographs taken with their phones or found on the web. Snap Fashion then returns results culled from its database, which currently counts over 100 retailers in its ranks. From there, items can be saved, shared or purchased by going to the retailers’ web sites.
And just as intriguing (not to mention inspiring): the site’s tech was developed by its founder, Jenny Griffiths, a 25-year-old computer science grad. Definitely a departure from the norm, and a welcome one at that.
More digital style news….