WEARDROBE

Role

Co-Founder & Chief Product & Design Officer

Date

2008 - 2010

Stage

Seed

Industry

Creator

OUTCOME

Acq. by Google

ACCOLADES

fbFund Finalist, SXSW Accelerator Winner 2008

Introduction

In 2007 the word influencer didn't exist. Neither did creator economy. The people who would build both were already online, photographing their outfits every day and posting them to Flickr groups and MySpace — platforms that had nothing to do with fashion and no way to find anyone in it.

I co-founded Weardrobe to give them a place where they belonged.

Building Our Community

In 2009, we brought our online community to life through the Weardrobe Conference, one of the first influencer meetups of its kind.

We invited top fashion bloggers from across the country to New York City for a weekend of panels, collaborations, and photo shoots, in partnership with Topshop, PacSun, Gilt Group, Tumblr, and the Gramercy Park Hotel.

The Weardrobe Conference Bloggers

Tavi Gevinson of Style Rookie
Jessica Schroeder of WhatIWore
Rebecca Stice of The Clothes Horse
Noelle & Joelle Sadler of The Owls are Not What They Seem
Katy Seibel of Kansas Couture
Christine Cameron of My Style Pill
Lucrecia Lee of Fashion is Poison
Laurel Stovall of It's Her Factory
Arabelle Sicardi of Fashion Pirates
Erin Hagstrom of Calivintage
Keiko Lynn
Claire Geist of Faboo
Krystal Bick of This Time Tomorrow
Amy Nelson of Flying a Kite
Brooke Kao of The Fashion Void that is DC
Audrey Leary of Homerunballerina
Kyla of Blue Collar Kyla
Kelly Framel of The Glamourai
Sara Neville of Style Magnet
Greta Eagan of Fashion Me Green

_____

Photo by Eddie Newton

"It's like summer fashion camp!"

Kate & Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte

Finding Value

When we started Weardrobe, we had no idea what success would look like. There was no grand plan for monetization or acquisition — just a belief that if we built something people loved, we’d figure it out along the way.

Our strategy was essentially curiosity: keep building, keep learning, and see where the community took us.

Over time, we secured a handful of early ad deals with brands like American Apparel, The Fashion Spot, and Glam, but those campaigns rarely exceeded a thousand dollars a month (if we were lucky). It was enough to pay for groceries, but not enough to reveal what Weardrobe’s true value was. That realization came from the outside.

Following the Weardrobe Conference, we were approached by Munjal Shah, the founder and CEO of Like.com, a visual shopping platform spending over $1 million a month on Google ads to capture fashion search traffic.

He had noticed something: for nearly every fashion-related search query — “H&M sweater,” “black Zara jeans,” “vintage leather jacket” — Weardrobe was the #1 organic search result, often multiple times on the first page.

They were paying millions for clicks we were earning for free.

The constant stream of user-generated outfit posts gave Weardrobe a small but powerful SEO footprint — a living, breathing catalog of fashion, updated daily by real people. That discovery reframed how we understood what we’d built: not just a community, but a powerful, self-sustaining content engine.

15k

Community Members

#1

Organic Search for Thousands of Fashion Queries

$3.2M

Acquired by Google via Like.com
In collaboration with

Suzanne Xie

CEO & Co-Founder