The Fashion Techie

Behind The Social Shopping Scenes: A Discussion with Kaboodle’s CEO

February 22nd, 2010

The CEO of one of the largest social shopping networks online took the time to answer a few questions for us about their role in online fashion and what he thinks about the future of fashion.  Here’s our recent interview with Manish Chandra, Founder and CEO of Kaboodle:

Some people say Kaboodle took social shopping to the next level. Did you think at the time Kaboodle would become a household fashion/technology name?

When we started, we were trying to solve a problem that we had all personally experienced as consumers – the challenge of “findability” of lifestyle goods on the web. It’s not easy to find cool, interesting, compelling products when you’re faced with millions of general search engine results. Like so many start-ups, we focused on solving a personal issue, knowing that others must also be having the same experience. We thought Kaboodle would be big because of the value it would offer, but we didn’t know how big. Kaboodle’s basic ability of allowing users to add products from any site on the web to their personal Kaboodle lists provided an immediate recognizable value to consumers and as the community grew, word quickly spread. Today, we have more than 15 million people visiting the Kaboodle site every month.

Your mission focuses on the consumer. However other retailers, like JCPenney, have partnered with the site. What does Kaboodle offer for smaller retailers and how important is that relationship to you?

Kaboodle’s mission is to make it easy for people to find the products they love and partnering with retailers helps us achieve that mission. The great thing about Kaboodle is that all of the products in our catalog have been added by users like you and me. That creates an even playing field for retailers where a handmade necklace from a small indie seller could be featured right next to a sweater from a large, nationwide department store. The Kaboodle community has added products from over 100,000 stores to the site and when consumers are browsing or searching, they are just as likely to find products from Etsy as they are from JCPenney or Target.

Our goal is to help consumers find the right products, and to that end, retailers, both large and small, are important stakeholders. We provide value to both consumers and retailers by connecting the two in unique, engaging and authentic ways. While we have had extremely successful, high-profile partnerships with major retailers, we also provide a number of ways for smaller partners to reach prospective customers on Kaboodle.

Any retailer can easily partner with Kaboodle simply by adding the “Add to Kaboodle” button to their site. This allows consumers to add that retailer’s products directly to their own personal Kaboodle lists, without ever leaving the retailer’s site. We recently launched an enhanced version of the “Add to Kaboodle” button, making it even easier for partners to embed (and easier for consumers to use!).

We also offer a couple of programs for smaller retailers that allow them to feature and highlight products, leverage some of the community’s tools (for example, they can poll the community to ask what product they prefer), and engage directly with consumers via our peer-to-peer messaging platform.

Being in the 2 fastest growing industries in the world (fashion and technology) how do you keep up while staying true to Kaboodle mission “shopping for people, by people”

By keeping our eyes on the consumer at all times. We aim to make her life easier and more convenient every single day by helping her discover new products, create wish lists, build weekly shopping lists, and share cool stuff with others. Everything we do is focused on simplifying her shopping journey and making the experience as enjoyable as possible. As the consumer becomes savvier, Kaboodle remains forward-thinking, anticipating our audience’s needs, demands and expectations.

What future changes can we look forward to seeing in the next year or 2 with Kaboodle?

We want to be wherever our consumers are (and wherever they want us to be) so one key area of focus is to make Kaboodle available on multiple platforms, whether it’s the web, on her phone, on another social networking site or even on retailer sites themselves.

Second, we have just launched real-time product search on our site, providing yet another dimension to our overall product search and browse functionality. We’re pioneering this advanced technology, so expect to see a lot more innovation from us in the area of real-time search. Behind the scenes, Kaboodle has patented and patent-pending technology which makes the consumer’s experience extremely rich and rewarding.

And of course, we will continue to surprise and delight consumers with the overall experience and the ability to consistently find the best products on the web!

Let’s talk about information overload. With so many social shopping sites popping up and all this information on the web including Google products and Facebook fan pages ran by retailers, how do you stay away from overloading users with information that’s not relative?

Kaboodle actually helps consumers deal with the challenge of information overload by providing them with the tools to save and organize their finds and by providing a rich catalog of products that have already been advocated in some way by other community members. In essence, the community has helped each other cut through the chaff and focus on the wheat.

Further, Kaboodle’s clustering technology allows the site to automatically group and identify the same product uploaded from different sources as a single item, while the site’s classifier determines which category it fits best. Collectively, these technologies enable consumers a cleaner and more relevant shopping experience through filtered searches, structured browsing, and the discovery of millions of products added by users.

Also, it’s really the consumers who control the dialogue on Kaboodle and as a result, the conversations are authentic, relevant and valuable. While we do partner with retail advertisers, we avoid a standard one-way approach to advertising and instead aim for authentic and transparent approaches that give the consumer the value she’s looking for.

In your words, what is Fashion 3.0 and how are you preparing for it?

Fashion 3.0 is about people. Certainly the fashion itself continues to play a central role, but people are the conduit for that fashion, more than they ever have been before. Certain people, like magazine editors, have always had influence, but now droves of individual shopping and fashion enthusiasts have the tools and the platforms to convey their own brand of influence. Technology in a Fashion 3.0 world connects individuals across the country and around the world and helps break down boundaries, allowing (and enabling) every individual to find and define his/her personal style and not be bound by parameters like geography. Fashion 3.0 is about global influence combined with smart local decisions and Kaboodle is well-positioned to facilitate both.

Special thanks to Kaboodle and Manish for taking time out of their busy schedules to join our discussions.  You too can join the conversation by commenting below.