We’ve all made some impulse buys while online shopping, but when it comes to the bigger decisions – a sturdy winter coat, a bridesmaid’s dress, a groom’s tie – you need a second opinion, or third, or fourth. And while it’s easy to bombard your friends and family with links to every different color dress or style of coat that catches your eye, it’s definitely not an organized method (not to mention, a slightly annoying one).
That’s why one local entrepreneur set out to build a platform for sharing, discussing and shopping different items from all over the web. Frank Chen, a Tufts graduate, launched Tisket this year, a company he describes as the “Pinterest for shopping.” Rather than creating boards intended for inspiration and discovery, each Tisket “collection” made by a user serves as a mini, personal online store. The user can then share the collections with friends, who will weigh in with their opinions through “likes” and comments on the site.
Whether it’s for a very specific item or a new fall wardrobe, the Tisket collections provide a way to easily save and store the items you find while shopping online, but aren’t ready to buy, as well as give friends and family a catch-all place to assess your potential purchases, be it a wedding dress or a dining room table. However, Chen, who formerly worked for local e-commerce company Rue La La, recognized that these heavyweight decisions only come around every so often – less often than he would like people to regularly use Tisket.
That’s where the fashion bloggers came in.
In addition to providing a way for the average user to build collections and share with friends, Tisket acts as a tool for fashion bloggers to easily curate the online items seen in their blog posts. The bloggers can make a collection, gather the items in one place, then pull the collection into the carousel seen at the bottom of each post, directing the reader to where the items can be found online.
Chen hopes that the bloggers who use Tisket (there are five active users now as the platform expands) will then implore the “average user” to join the platform. While the bloggers’ collections will remain private on the
site, he plans to incorporate a public “Explore” function that will curate the top items with the most likes and comments for viewers to scroll through.
Another way Chen sees a bright future for Tisket will lie in its natural ability to pluck fashion trends as they’re being introduced on the web. When enough bloggers are curating their daily posts through the site, the explore function will showcase of-the-moment trends as they appear on different blogs. This ability to predict trends is something Chen hopes the company can capitalize on in the coming months.
As Tisket gains users and momentum, Chen and his part-time team members, Eric Lonstein and Ozzie Osman, both Harvard Business School graduates, are working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. To ramp up some buzz, Chen turned to his fellow entrepreneurs and neighbors working at iLab to gauge the status of style in the startup world, starting with their incubator.
Click through the photo series to get an inside look at both the companies and the fashion over at Harvard Innovation Lab, curated by Chen in a “Humans of New York“-style collection, and keep your eye on Tisket as it grows out of its beginning phases.
All images via Frank Chen
