“Entertainment Shopping” is one of the more controversial genres of startups emerging on the web. The basic premise: you pay for a chance to get something at far cheaper than it normally sells for, but there’s a risk that you’ll come away with nothing. It’s part gambling, part bargain hunting and it’s proved to be very popular, with sites like Swoopo leading the charge and other sites bringing the model to hotels and other verticals. And today, TechCrunch Disrupt Finalist ToVieFor is bringing entertainment shopping to a new market: high fashion.
If you like Gilt Groupe (a site that offers high-fashion items in fire-sales), this should be right up your alley. Log onto the site, and you’ll see an array of high-end handbags and accessories being sold off at a potentially steep discount. If you want to buy one (or at least, a chance to buy one), you need to buy some ToVieFor credits, which run 99 cents and are cheaper in bulk. And then you can get down to business.
Jump into a ToVieFor sale — it costs you one to five credits to join one — and you’ll see whatever handbag or accessory you clicked on featured front-and-center. It is featured with a suggested retail price, which begins to drop. As it continues to drop, you can hit the ‘buy’ button to nab it at the price that’s currently being displayed. It’s a bit like a game of chicken — the site only sells a finite number of each item, so if you wait too long for the price to drop even further, you’ll miss out. And even if you don’t wind up buying the item, you’re still out those credits.
To help allay any frustration about missing out on a sale the site will often offer users, namely those who bid on many sales, some discounts, incentives and gift cards for the same brand if they’ve missed out on an item.
ToVieFor can offer these goods at significantly below retail price because it makes money off of these credits (a similar model is used by other entertainment shopping sites). And brands benefit from this because ToVieFor gives them a new marketing channel to connect with customers — you might not get that Rebecca Minkoff or Louis Vuitton purse at 60% off, but the company can email you a coupon for 20% off.
ToVieFor’s model isn’t totally novel, but the site looks well done. The success of Gilt proves that consumers are hungry for deals on fashion, and ToVieFor’s addictive model could well harness it. That said, the site is going to have to figure out the balance between making money and leaving users frustrated, and it needs to make sure it keeps premium fashion brands on board.
DD: How do you get to the women that buy this high quality clothes.
A: Similar way to Gilt Groupe, targetting women in New York city, those women are our friends. Start there, give incentives to invite friends.
JS: Have you done any trials? If friends are vying for the same thing and all show up to party wearing the same thing…
A: Very much in the way sample sale sites made discounts into entertainment, part of the reason it worked was that it was very exclusive. We may only have five handbags available and 500 people playing…
LL: How are you making sure you get high-end fasion?
A: We work directly with brands. Position it as very high-end. The price point is typically a 300-800 dollar bag. For brands it’s a marketing ploy. If they sell 50 bags at a discount they may sell 5,000 more at full price later.
Over the years, there have been occasional controversies over how much of Maureen Dowd’s work she actually writes. I’m beginning to wonder how much of it she even reads.
Here’s Dowd yesterday, describing “Republican Mean Girls” (warning: spit-take-inducing hypocrisy ahead):
These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.
Maureen Dowd criticizing other people for “snide comments” about hair and “belittling the president’s manhood” is like Sarah Palin criticizing someone for substituting practiced folksiness for factual analysis. Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby offered an overview of the hypocrisy:
In the past decade, Dowd has relentlessly “belittled the manhood” of a long string of Democratic pols. (Needless to say, this includes “Obambi,” the “diffident debutante” who reminded Dowd of Scarlett O’Hara. Al Gore was “so feminized he was practically lactating.”) She has made endless snide remarks about various major pols’ hair. (Endlessly, John Edwards was ridiculed as “the Breck Girl.” She wrote at least seven columns which revolved around Gore’s bald spot.) And no fashion show ever got more play than Gore’s alleged switch to earth tones, an invented theme Dowd was happy to pimp, often in the columns where she imagined Gore fussing about The Spot as he looked into a mirror.
But that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. In 2007, I argued that Dowd’s gender-based attacks on Democratic politicians aren’t all that different from Ann Coulter’s habit of calling them “faggots.”
And Dowd’s obsession with clothes and hair and feminizing male Democrats isn’t a thing of the distant past. She’s still at it. Here’s the lede of her August 31 column:
If we had wanted earth tones in the Oval Office, we would have elected Al Gore.
So: Has the Maureen Dowd who denounced “Republican Mean Girls” for “belittling the president’s manhood” and “making snide comments about a rival’s hair” and “ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show” ever read any columns by the Maureen Dowd who has spent decades trying to perfect exactly that kind of behavior? And do either of them understand the role Dowd has played in legitimizing the behavior she denounced yesterday?
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