For those who love to inspire and inspiration overload is your idea of a good time, we’ve compiled a list of sites sure to suit one, if not all, of your needs. Some are new, some are more established; but all have one goal in mind – connecting their members to the fashion world via the world-wide-web, fostering social connections and creating awareness for brands, bloggers and the fashion community in general.
These five made their way to the top of our list:
1) Lyst – A social shopping site that let’s you create a stylefeed aka “lyst.” If curated properly, your stylefeed offers inspiration and updates by allowing you to follow your favorite designers, boutiques, bloggers and stylists. You can shop your lyst and also receive alerts when the products you’ve listed go on sale. Personalized discovery that saves you time and money – sign us up!
2) StyledOn – Share your personal style with a like-minded community. Members build a personal portfolio by sharing images pertaining to the fashion and home categories. All images can be linked back to major social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a nice feature – users can tag the brands in their pictures giving the StyledOn community more than just a pretty picture. Members can actually shop the looks of other members. Inspiration becomes an actual purchase and members have made the fashion world a happy place.
3) Polyvore – An online trend board. “Polyvore is the web’s largest fashion community site.” No arguments there. It’s a tough task trying to piece together an outfit across various websites. Enter Polyvore, a site that allows members to create there own inspiration boards by “clipping” the items of your choice from the web, assorting the items to create a “set,” then sharing your finished product with your social network. Viola! A very addictive site that makes choosing an outfit ten times more efficient and fun!
4) Chictopia – What to wear? How does this outfit look? Regardless of shape, size and taste, members of this large and growing community (over 200,000 registered users) share their personal style, style tips and receive updates on the latest fashion trends via the site’s Everybody is Ugly blog. An added bonus, members can shop the marketplace and redeem chic rewards with chic points earned by sharing Chictopia with their social networks, simply logging in and receiving or leaving comments. Collect points and share your chic-ness.
5) Kaboodle – The creation of Kaboodle stemmed from a married couple’s frustration as they were remodeling their home. Manish Chandra and his wife, Asha, needed an online platform to aid in the search for new products, retailers and reviews. Since this platform did not exist online, Manish and his two co-founders, Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya, created Kaboodle.
The online shopping community became an effective shopping tool allowing people to organize their shopping, share their style with like-minded members, compare prices and receive discounts on products that interest them. Categories include fashion, home and beauty to cater to almost every online shopping need.
We didn’t forget about the fashionable and online-savvy men out there in the cyber world. Because men need to be inspired as much as women – below, a masculine site to even the online playing field:
AskMen – With roughly 19 million readers a month, AskMen is an online lifestyle magazine for men. The fashion portion of the site offers reviews on apparel, accessories and grooming. Interviews and tips from style icons round out the site with articles about topics from how to dress for an interview to how to sweatproof your clothes. Everything a man needs to know all in one place!
