Shop It To Me Launches Threads & We Get a Tour

• At home in their offices in San Francisco's SoMa 'hood, the Shop It To Me team may look demur and buttoned-up.
• But never fear. They know how to hang loose.
• A helpful reminder atop one pod helps keep the focus on the macro goals at hand.
• Shop It To Me's CEO Charlie Graham
• Mood boards keep fashion inspiration at the forefront
• More style inspiration, this time in the form of vintage sketches, dresses up a desk.

Fashion startups have been popping up like baby bunnies lately, but not every company that combines style and technology is a newcomer to the space. Case in point: San Francisco’s Shop It To Me, founded in 2004 by Charlie Graham. There are droves of companies out there at the moment trying to find new ways to cater to consumers increasingly overwhelmed by marketing and promotional emails, sales, discount codes and deals – so much so that it can easily start to sound like the latest innovative idea well to bubble up from the digital style landscape. But SITM was thinking about this problem – gasp! – eight years ago.

In fact, its Salemail email of personalized deals from popular retailers has amassed over 4 million subscribers. But as in fashion and in technology, solutions must evolve and change with the times. After plugging along rather quietly for several years in its industrial chic SoMa headquarters (located in the same building as TechCrunch and other notable tech companies), SITM recently debuted its revamped and updated solution to consumer deal-finding woes: Threads, billed as an online personal shopper that lets you follow brands, trends and specific items and alerts you to new markdowns daily.

Along with following threads like Shop It To Me staff picks and DVF dresses, I recently created a thread for moccasins so I’ll know when styles go on sale. While I haven’t pulled the trigger on a pair yet (something about seeing them listed in a magazine feature as a great gift for tweens this Christmas has been holding me back), I’m able to watch the prices fluctuate and may very well pounce if something attractive enough appears in my dashboard. That you can set maximum prices for items you’re watching also helps: no need to see items outside my budget, unless I want to (because hey, there’s always Pinterest to think about).

Soon after hearing the Threads news, I stopped by SITM with Jennymay in tow and took a few shots of the team and their surroundings. We dragged them from their desks and made them do the obligatory group shots, and they were great sports (who, after all, really wants to be forced class picture-style into a line-up by total strangers the morning after a festive launch party for your company’s latest product?). But they threw up their hang loose signals for us and generally made us feel welcome. And for that, in the words of Daniel T., we thank them.

Want more behind-the-scenes digital style? Check out our visit to Copious.

Photography by Jennymay Villarete for Digital Style Digest