StyleFeeder

» see stylefeeder.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The clothes were never the interesting part of StyleFeeder. Underneath a site full of shoes and handbags sat a collaborative filter built on machine learning work out of MIT, doing the thing recommenders were supposed to do and mostly did not. It watched what you saved, then handed you what people with overlapping taste had saved next. In 2006 that was a hard problem, and StyleFeeder was one of the few consumer sites where you could feel it working.

Philip Jacob started it in January 2005 and opened it to the public on 16 October. The mechanic was a browser bookmarklet. You were on any retailer's product page, you clicked, and the item landed in your StyleFeeder list with its price and picture intact, no matter whose store it came from. Lists were public, so the whole thing worked as a shopping social network years before that phrase existed as a category. The company raised about $4 million from Schooner Capital and Highland Capital Partners along with a set of angels, and stayed small.

Fashion e-commerce was not a place I ever went, and a service built on clipping from American retailers had nothing to offer anyone shopping from Turkey in 2007. I read about StyleFeeder the way engineers read about other people's recommendation systems, which is to say I cared about the filter and not the inventory.

Time Inc closed its purchase on 15 January 2010 and confirmed it publicly four days later. The price was never disclosed and the founder made a point of saying so. Time's plan was to run the recommendation engine underneath its own fashion brands, and in November 2010 it launched StyleFind, a standalone shopping site built on StyleFeeder's technology and fed by People and InStyle.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eleven months later ~

In December 2011 Time Inc announced it was closing StyleFind.com and folding the commerce features into the People and InStyle sites instead. The first magazine shopping site to get its own domain went back inside the magazines it came from, a year and a month after launch. StyleFeeder.com held on for a few more weeks: the archive has a real page there on 1 December 2011 and a redirect by early January.

~ the part that was worth money ~

What Time actually bought was a working recommender and a team that understood it. What Time did with it was point it at two magazine audiences and then decide, inside two years, that a separate shopping destination was not worth maintaining. Publishers in that period kept buying commerce technology to offset falling ad revenue, and kept discovering that a magazine reader arriving from an article is not the same person as a shopper arriving with an intent to buy.

~ the vein ~

Social shopping had a good five-year run and almost nothing survived it. Kaboodle sold to Hearst in 2007 and Svpply sold to eBay in 2013, and both ended up switched off by the buyer. Polyvore made it further than either, went to Yahoo in 2015, and was still shut down in 2018. StyleFeeder's buyer was a magazine publisher instead of a retailer or a platform, and it lasted twenty-three months after the sale, which is about average for the group.

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