Jess Lee became CEO of Polyvore after emailing the founders with product feedback. She talks about the new Remix app, why personalization matters, and what she learned from Marissa Mayer about leading a company built on community trends like disneybounding.
So we recently launched a new app called Polyvore Remix and it actually just got featured by Apple as one of the best new apps on the App Store homepage. So we're really excited about that. So what Remix does is it shows you the latest trends from the Polyvore community. If you see here, it's working a caramel ankle boot into your closet. If you tap on that, we automatically style it for you so you can see all the different ways to wear it.
Do you think of Polyvor primarily as a fashion company or as a tech company?
Definitely is a tech company. Yeah. We happen to be in the fashion space, in the lifestyle space, but we are definitely a tech company. A lot of the value of the company is driven by what the engineering team builds and personalization technology, the attention paid to the user experience, and that editing experience, which is a lot of fun to drag and drop all the products together.
I have read that your journey to CEO started with you sending complaints to Polyvore's co founder. Would you recommend that as a job hunting strategy?
I would actually, because I think if someone takes the time to think about the product and come up with a list of compliments and complaints, it really stands out. It makes you stand out as someone applying for a job. So when I get those kinds of letters or I've seen, I've received presentations and found, like, spiral notebooks, I've definitely paid more attention to the.
Do you remember what your original complaints were?
Yeah, I do. I wanted Polyvore to have a rotate tool so you could swivel the items around and we did build that shortly thereafter.
So empowering.
Yeah, it was great.
I have heard it said that Polyvore is creating an army of Anna Wintours.
Yeah.
Do we need more than one Anna Wintour?
Well, I think what makes Anna Wintour really special is she has an amazing taste level and she's got a powerful voice that a lot of people listen to. And so what Polyvore does is it empowers sort of the next generation of influencers to find their audience and share their style around the world. But you don't have to live in New York or be a top editor at a magazine to do that. You can be a super user on Polyvore. An example I just saw yesterday, I saw this article about this new trend called disneybounding. Have you heard of disneybounding?
Oh, my God, no. I just got on board with the pizza unitards. Like, I really am not ready.
Yeah, so disneybounding refers to sort of dressing up and incorporating a little bit of, like, a Disney character into your clothing, like your everyday look. And I just saw yesterday that that was written up in cnn. So just this one user who's built up this following now has made an impact on Satin. That's really cool.
One of your first bosses, Marissa Meyer, what did you learn from her about leadership?
I learned a lot from Marissa. One thing I learned is it's always great to roll up your sleeves and prove to your team that you can do the work. She gets very involved in the details, and I learned a lot about that from her. The other is the importance of simple UI design. For a long time, Google has had a very simple user experience, just plain white with a search box. And a lot of that came from Marisa. So that's another major thing I've learned about design. Simple is best.
You also learned a lot of lessons from your mom, is that correct?
Yeah, yeah. I grew up in Hong Kong, and my mom ran her own company out of our apartment. It's a small translation interpretation business. She's still running it today in our apartment.
Is she advertising herself as your mother now?
But, you know, I think growing up, seeing her as an entrepreneur, it never occurred to me that it was unusual for a woman to be an entrepreneur or CEO or leader. So I never formed that preconceived notion that girls couldn't do it. So I kind of went for it.
So then when you hear questions about women in tech, are you like, all right, enough with the women in tech conversation, or do you feel like it needs to continue?
I think it is an important conversation. It's not that useful to hear, you know, about the juicy stories of, like, how men have gotten me down or anything. I mean, I've been lucky to have had a lot of female and male role models. I think it's more important to focus on what can be done.
Do you have a sense of what can be done?
Yeah, I think people really focus on the recruiting pipeline, getting more women into companies. I think it's actually important to focus on what happens after as well as what happens before. So after, once you join the company, is it a meritocratic environment where both men and women and, you know, all diverse races and shy people versus loud people. Right. Even is it really meritocratic? And can everyone get ahead based on their true contribution? So there's a lot of work to do there, and that's really, really important to fix. And then before recruiting, like, when young girls are in school and they're growing up, are they already ruling out entire career paths because they don't see any role models or they feel like it's not for them. Like I said, my mom influenced my beliefs about what was possible for girls versus boys. So I think it's really important to work on that stage too. Like in high school, in middle school.
You now have several years at Polybor. What still excites you about this job?
Learning every single day. As the company gets bigger, the challenges as CEO change. Like, just when I feel like I figured out how to do my job, it changes underneath me because. Because there's some new thing that happens in the market or the team size grows and we reach a new level of scale. So it's always challenging and always changing. So that's what keeps it interesting.
Finish the sentence for me. I'll know I have succeeded at Polyvore.
If I'll know I've succeeded at Polyvore if. Every woman and young girl feels really good about their own personal style. What's cool about Polywar and that idea of empowering the army of Ana Wintours is that you have very diverse perspectives on style and you can find the niche of style that fits you and feel awesome about it. So I think style should be about expressing who you really are and feeling awesome about it, rather than trying to fit into some narrow ideal chosen by the industry. Yeah. So that's how I know we'll have succeed.
