Polyvore Co-Founders Jess Lee and Pasha Sadri

Hey, I'm Colleen Taylor with TechCrunch TV. Here with us today is Jess Lee and Pasha Sadri, the co founders of fashion site Polyvore. Hi, guys.

Hello.

Hi.

And so Polyvore has been around for five years now. Sort of one of the pioneers in the fashion industry, Internet web space. So I know you guys have some numbers that have come out recently. Can you tell us about how the growth has been? Sure.

It's been a really big month for us. We just crossed 15 million monthly uniques, and this is a pretty big traffic surge. We were at 13 million monthly uniques the month before, so we grew about 2 million uniques. The growth is attributed to two main factors. One is our direct traffic has just been going through the roof, and the other half of that is Pinterest has been driving us a lot of traffic.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting, the Pinterest angle. Did you guys say you're the sixth most pinned site? Is that.

Yeah, according to a couple of sites that have done analysis on where Pinterest traffic is going and what's getting pinned. Apparently we are the sixth largest source of original content. We also just added a pin it button, which has driven it up even more.

I see. Cool. And so just can you say really quickly what Polyvore is? I mean, I think a lot of people probably know what it is, but if you could just give the quick overview. Sure.

Well, we believe that style can come from anywhere. You don't have to be living in New York or be part of the fashion industry to be really stylish. So we've built a platform that empowers people to express their sense of style, sort of giving a voice to anyone who cares about fashion, who wants to express what they think is hot, and then you can follow your favorite people whose style you like, and then you get sort of this infinite fashion magazine that you can. It's infinitely browsable, instantly shoppable. We have a tool that lets people mix and match products to create these outfits or collages that we call sets. And that's sort of what. That's what you see on Polywar. Lots of beautiful sets about people's style. It could be their celebrity looks. It could be what they want to wear tomorrow. All different niches of taste.

Great. And how has the growth been? Because adding 2 million monthly uniques in one month is pretty big. Do you see it? Has it kind of been growing on a trajectory where it's really speeding up now?

Yeah, we've been growing steadily since the launch of the site. But we are finding that because the active community has grown over the years, all of their actions are happening at a faster rate. So we expect to continue to grow in absolute terms at a faster rate compared to the previous years.

And thinking about the Pinterest question, when you guys came out five years ago, it was kind of unique, I guess, to be blending technology and fashion in this way on the web. It was kind of an unaddressed space. But now it seems like there are a lot of different sites coming out. I mean, how much. How do you balance being sort of competitive with these companies and also being complementary?

Well, I think Polyvore's all along been about outfits very strongly about mixing and matching to create outfits that express your sense of style. That's something we've always stuck to, never wavered from. We think it's actually really exciting that there's a lot more activity in the fashion space. When we first started, it was considered a little bit, I guess, unsexy, but now it's definitely heating up. And I think that validates that there is a really big business opportunity in fashion. So we're excited about that.

Yeah. And so talking about the business opportunity, how has your revenue been impacted here? Are you guys seeing, are you profitable yet? How. What can you tell me about the revenues?

Yeah, we recently, in 2011, we reached profitability. So really excited about that. We make money from affiliate as well as from brand advertising. So we run banners. But then I think the more interesting opportunity on Polygor is sponsorship opportunities, because the sets that people make, you can kind of think of them as user generated ads. Of course, the users don't think about it that way. The community is making sets that express products they love. And you can kind of think of that as a word of mouth endorsement. So when I put J. Crew into a set or my favorite Burberry handbag, that's me telling, saying that I love Burberry and I'm telling all my friends about it. I share it on Facebook, I pin it to Pinterest, I put it on Twitter. That's sort of the best form of word of mouth marketing that Burberry or J. Crew could possibly get. So our platform has a way for you to promote your message to the Polyvore community and get it spread across the web.

Great. And I know you also just recently brought on a new CFO or your first ever cfo, Right. Can you tell me about that?

Sure. So we just brought on a really amazing new cfo. Her name is Cheryl Dalrymple. She was Formerly the CFO of AdMob. So she was there from when it was about 35 ish to 175 ish. So she watched it, she helped it really grow. It was a really fast growing company. And then after it was acquired by Google, she led the integration efforts there. So we're super, super excited about her because she really gets tech startup culture. She's been part of a really fast growing company before. She knows how to start scale. She understands advertising because that's her background and she's been CFOing for 15 years. So we're super, super excited to have her on board.

Nice. And I know you guys just closed your. Well, a month ago now or two months, your 14 million Series C funding round, and once you get to the series C level and then you bring on a cfo, people start thinking, how close are you to a sale or an IPO or one of these things? I mean, you guys are definitely at that level right now. Can you tell me what's going on?

Well, all the options are on the table. We're just sort of trying to focus on building the best possible product, growing the team, and then we'll see what happens.

How many employees do you guys have now?

You're at 41.

Yeah, 41.

Oh, wow. So it's pretty small still, considering. That's interesting. Why such a tightly run ship?

Well, we are continuing to grow definitely, and we anticipate the team is going to grow quite rapidly in the next year or so. But we've always also believed as a technology company in applying technology to this space, which gives us a lot of efficiency. Something that we are really proud of in terms of, say, uniques per engineering staff. I think you're up there in terms of being very competitive with everybody else.

I see. Yeah. Our motto is to do a few things well. So we really try to keep it super simple, make everything really efficient.

Great. And I know you guys also just recently went to Fashion Week actually in person. Can you tell me about that and what it was like to kind of bring the nerd contingent or the blogger contingent to Bryant Park?

I'll let Jess talk about that.

Well, we've always, you know, we've always thought that the fashion industry is a little bit. It's super exclusive, it's very top down. And we wanted to build Polywar to let people everywhere, you don't have to live in New York to really participate in fashion. So this is sort of a culmination of like a really a longtime dream of ours. But we threw A fashion show. Our very own fashion show called Polyvore Live during New York Fashion Week in February. Instead of working with established designers, we had four up and coming designers from fit. They showed their collections they otherwise probably wouldn't have had a chance to show at Fashion Week. Instead of having professional models, we went with a cast of all fashion bloggers, so they got to walk the Runway. We invited our community members to come to the front row. Some of them we flew in from Germany or Canada. And some of these people are people we'd never met before, but we communicated really closely with them on Polyvore. So to meet them for the first time with it was really, really special. We also livestreamed the show on the site, and we had buyers and editors come as well so that those designers could get a lot of exposure. But it was really, really fun.

And how have you found that the traditional fashion industry, from the magazines to the designers, have you noticed a change in how they've treated Polyvore and companies like Polyvore just over the past five years? Has the web started to be taken more seriously?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that the Internet always has sort of democratizing effect on every industry it touches. And the fashion industry hasn't been an exception. Bloggers are getting invited to the front row now. Shots are, you know, Burberry live tweets the looks before they go down the Runway. We're seeing a lot more activity. And I think the fashion industry has been pretty receptive of Polywar. We've done great partnerships with folks like Burberry and Gucci, some of the more established luxury houses. And we've also been trying to use the data that we collect from Polyvore to help fashion designers make better business decisions. We track every single product that's used on the site. So we know that this particular Burberry bag was used in, you know, was viewed 100,000 times and was used in 40,000 sets or ET cetera, et cetera. So we actually do offer an analytics tool, and we package that up into a monthly intelligence report, and you can also access it on our site@Polyboard.com analytics. But, you know, I think the fashion industry wants this kind of data available. They want the insight. So that's something we've been able to offer.

Right, Cool. And so what's next for you guys? You know, what kind of growth are you expecting over the coming months? What. What are your plans? I mean, now you're profitable. You just raised this big bunch of money, like, on top of the money that you're already making. What are you going to do with that? Can you give me any details about what's coming up?

Well, we still have a really long product roadmap that we are really excited about and it keeps getting longer and longer, so we'd like to make progress against that roadmap. The funds will be primarily used for growing the team so that we can do things more quickly and in parallel and in the future. There are a couple of different areas that we'd like to expand to. One of them is more consumption interfaces like mobile and tablet devices, which we are really excited about, especially tablet interfaces, because Polyvor is sort of a community generated fashion magazine, and fashion magazines will look really beautiful and stunning on tablets. The other area for us is other verticals which we have talked about. Polyvore has been focused on fashion exclusively, but we believe that the Polyvor product works for other adjacent verticals. For example, interior design or weddings. Basically wherever you see those categories also have their own fashion type magazines. And then finally international. Our content on Polyvore doesn't require translation and therefore it can work internationally. And in fact, about half of our traffic, or slightly less than half of our traffic, is international. But we think that there's a big opportunity for us to be a global brand and company in the future.

Cool. So it sounds like the tightly run ship isn't completely what you want to stay as it sounds like growth is definitely what you're doing internally and externally too.

There's a huge opportunity this entire area and that's why you see so much activity in it. It's still very early days.

Yeah. And it makes money. What a concept. Great. Well, Jess and Pasha, thank you so much for. For coming by and giving us some numbers and news. We really appreciate it.

Our pleasure.