Dress Like a Celeb on Like.com

Posted by Lesley Scott Mar 11, 2007

Using sophisticated visual search technology, the site combs through millions of blouses, dresses, jackets, footwear, maternity, sunglasses and accessories from 350 affiliate merchants – including lizclaiborne.com, Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, A|X Armani Exchange and eBay - and provides a range of alternatives. "You can fully dress yourself now, on Like," Munjal Shah, the CEO recently told WWD. Part of the way the site earns its 10 to 15 percent commission on the purchase price, or, alternatively, 40 to 50 cents per click, is the high quality of the search results. Unlike typical text-based search, Like.com’s image recognition creates a "visual signature" for each of their celeb photos from Getty Image made up of 10,000 data points. Search can easily be modified to focus on specific details of an outfit such as color, shape or trim.

In the future, Like.com plans to let people upload their own photos, a feature which David Polinchock , CEO of New York thinktank Brand Experience Lab - which studies how new technologies affect consumers’ perceptions about brands – predicts will be phenomenally successful. "I see someone walk down the street and I say, 'I like those glasses.' We all do this." Now, with a simple snap of a digital camera, it will be easy to find a similar pair online. Unlike many new technologies which expect users to conform to it – what Polinchock dubs a "hammer looking for a nail" approach – Like.com will be taking advantage of behavior we already do in the real world: people watching & product lust. "It's a democratization of fashion," notes Polinchock, about this user content generated approach. "One of the fascinating things to me is that this didn't come from retail. You would have thought that some fashion-forward retailer would have thought of it."