The OC fashion site

Hey everyone. Man it's been a little while since I've posted. I'm rusty! I just wanted to write real quick to let everyone know about a cool new site that we came across the other day. For all of you looking to learn how to emulate the fashion of the O.C. they have a website on Amazon that is cool stuff. The URL is http://www.amazon.com/theoc.

I hope you like it!

keep flossin'
iji

An update on the team

Ok, so a little disclaimer. I think this post feels a little drier than usual...less inspired. It doesn't help that I'm almost falling asleep. How am I so sleepy!?!? It's only 10:06pm. Dude, if this were college, I'd be downing my first red bull and vodka about now! Ah well, I need to write this so that everyone can get back up to date with what's going on.

So it's been a little quiet on the line for the past two weeks. I can't even believe it's been that long. For some reason I thought it had been little over a week. I guess time really does fly.

Even though it's been about two weeks since the last blog entry, we've been pretty busy here at FLOSS. Me, Dirty, and Fu have been putting together a lot of cool stuff. We finally have started to get back on our rhythm. Now the ideas are flowing freely again, and our speed of progress is picking up.

Things are much different now. A lot of the big technology pieces we were building earlier in the project have been built now. Before, Dirty and I used to be working 20-30 hours a week each just to get features built. Now most of the projects we work on are small five hour affairs. They aren't really even projects. More like projectettes, haha.

So just to give you a little feel for what we've been working on, I'll go through some of the stuff.

Dirty is putting together a tool that will automagically disable old products that are no longer for sale. Before we used to have to manually disable each item that was out of stock or no longer being sold. Imagine the tedium! Just thinking about it is making me doze off... Well, we're not the most disciplined guys in the world, so we knew that if we left it a manual process soon the site would be full of dead links. So like any great engineers we wrote software that would do it for us!! Dirty is ironing out the kinks as we speak. Hopefully it'll be up on the site within the next 24 hours. I'm actually pretty excited about this. This is one of the cooler tools that we've built since we started working on FLOSS.

Of course, not to be outdone, I threw in a couple of lines of code too. Just so you know, if you ask Dirty he would say I was outdone by him at birth, haha. But to be fair, when I say a couple I don't think that's an exaggeration. I basically made it so that suggested items showed their pictures on the page. That took all of fifteen minutes to implement, but the cool thing is that now it's easier to see the suggested items. Designer Ella from KissMeStace was the one to point out that our suggested item links looked like google ads. It was a good catch on her part. Now we've done it up much better.

So that was the past, what about the future. Well we finally decided it's time to turn our vision away from technology. We've been working almost non-stop on technology for the past five months, but what's really needed now is better content. So that's been the focus for the past week, and will continue to be for the next month or so.

We started hiring more Flossers aka Fashion Consultants to help us put more suggested items on the site. Remember in my last blog I said we've realized that this is the last missing piece? Well now we're attacking the problem.

We've gotten some of the most fashionable, and fashion concious people out there to join us to suggest items. Look out for some new names!

Now. The most exciting item on our plate is the press release. Fucasso is owning this. He has drafted a press release that is so money. Straight money in the bank right there.

We're putting together a press package and hopefully we'll be getting that ish out in a couple of days. Once that's together it'll be time to start telling the world about FLOSS IN STYLE. It'll be mad cool to see how many news outlets pick it up. Honestly, I think a lot will. So far people have loved the idea!

So that's all the good stuff. I'll let you know when we finish the press release. I'll probably post it up on the blog for those that are curious to read it.

Aight. Time for me to bounce out.

keep flossin',
iji

Cool people and suggested items

Ah, summertime is here. I love the summer. Old school music. Long, warm, sunny days. Mimosas, Sangria, and Mojitos. And of course more FLOSS IN STYLE. Now I only need to be FLOSSin on a sandy beach in Cali and my life would be perfect.

So I want to spend some time talking about what’s next for FLOSS IN STYLE. Me, Dirty, and Fucasso have been hard at work making small but important improvements to the site. We’ve also been working with some wonderful people to spread the word to the world about the coolness that is FLOSS IN STYLE.

The three of us founders got together about a month ago now to talk about where we go next with FLOSS. We realized that we have all this cool technology, and FLOSS IN STYLE looks great, but we’re missing a key ingredient. We don’t have enough suggested items. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we want to roughly double the number of suggested items we have over the next month or so. We also want to drastically increase the incoming rate of items.

Well we’ve started to put together the last pieces in the puzzle. We had to build some technology to help our Google rank. Dirty built that. We had to improve our suggested item click through rate, Dirty and I did that on a two-way collabo. We added branding and changes the picture sort order to favor suggested items. We needed a plan on how we were going to ramp suggested items. Fucasso took the lead on that front. And so it goes…

The last piece was getting the word out about the site. Well our site focuses on celebrity fashion and we figured it would be most loved by fashionistas that appreciate what we’re trying to do and would applaud our efforts.

Well we couldn’t have been prepared for the warm reception the online fashion and celebrity communities have given us. We already talked about the people over at Jen-Fan. Now let me tell you about some of the best fashion bloggers on the internet.

We’ve been in touch with Elle at KissMeStace (http://kissmestace.com/). She’s just a wonderful person, very kind and full of energy. We’re excited to see that she really loves our concept and is even helping suggest items! She is a true expert on celebrity fashion. Check out this Coach handbag post for Eva Longoria! http://www.flossinstyle.com/ShoppingMall/CelebShop.aspx?pictureID=510&sessionGuid=blog What a great find! I love this stuff!

We’ve met a lot of great people as we’ve been doing this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Britanny over at The Fashion Musings of Brittany Ancell (http://fashion.typepad.com/). She’s another really cool and sincere individual. She’s written a post about FLOSS IN STYLE that all of you reading this blog would be interested in http://fashion.typepad.com/tfmoba/2005/05/speaking_of_fas.html. Along with KissMeStace, Brittany runs one of the best fashion blogs on the web.

On a side note, I guess blogs can only exist on the web…so the “on the web” part is meaningless. Let’s just say Brittany runs one of the best blogs out there.

There are a number of other great people that I can’t even go into detail about because of limited space, and I’m sure you’re already tired of reading this J. So here are the people I’d like to thank: Lera over at Fashion Addict Diary, Coolchiq, Erin from Jen-Fan and so many others.

It’s cool to see the community around FLOSS IN STYLE grow. Hopefully we have many more people to meet, and much more growth ahead of us.

Now that the pieces are falling in place, it’s time for us to make suggested items our clear #1 priority. Right now it’s kind of mixed in with the others.

I can’t wait to get the new content up. FLOSS IN STYLE is becoming more fun every day!!

keep flossin’
iji

FLOSS In Style gets page view number 100,000

Whoooo hooooo!!!! We've passed 100,000 page views. Next stop 1 million. This feels really cool. Honestly don't ask me why. It's only a number. Still, it feels like a big number. Although I know if we get where we want to go it'll seem small in retrospect. One day hopefully we'll be celebrating having reached 100,000 page views per hour. Haha, that day will come, but don't expect me to hold my breath.

What I will do, however, is say that the people over at Jen-Fan.com are mad cool. If you're a Jennifer Aniston fan, and you don't have a celebrity forum you call home, check out the people over at Jen-Fan. They were so friendly. Dirty posted up a link to our website the other day asking for feedback from people on the forums there, you know, just to get some thoughts from hardcore fans.

Well they loved FLOSS IN STYLE. Not that I'm surprised of course. We know we're onto something cool over here at FLOSS, but it's still great to hear other people confirm that intuitive sense of ballerhood we feel :). Ok let me stop being cocky before god strikes my laptop with a bolt of lightning.

So. Oh, there have been a couple of changes on the website. First off, I think all of you guys know this by now, but we've added discussion forums now to FLOSS IN STYLE. These forums will serve as a central location where people can meet and chat about all things celebrity fashion.

We realized that shopping on Floss can be a lonely activity. We have tons of cool pics, we have great suggested items (thanks to SexyFLOSSinGal and FlossinSista!!) and we have cool features. But regardless of all of the stuff we have, to us Floss can still feel like a ghost town sometimes. I think all websites are like that. However, we're intent not to be like all websites. So we decided to work on the problem.

We think that forums are a part of the solution. I say a part because I'm sure there are more parts to making FLOSS IN STYLE more fun. But hey, how much can you really expect us to do in a weekend.

Oh also, we added website and brand information to suggested items. We realized that a bunch of people think that the suggested items on each page come from our website. Nope. We just link to other people's website. Hopefully by adding this information to the suggested item button, people will understand it a little better.

Hey by the way. If anyone wants to contact me, my AOL screename is topflosser. I'm not always online under topflosser, but I'll try to be more often. All right time to go to sleep. Just got back in Seattle from a wedding in Sacramento and I'm tired.

keep flossin',
iji

Let's Catch up a Little

Good thing I'm typing this, because I lost my voice this weekend. Just got back from Canada. A friend from the frat, DNH, real name Herman, came up to visit me from LA.

It was ridiculous. Way too much partying. Basically, since Thursday I've been yelling at the top of my lungs. I swear I was yelling every minute. I was either:

1) Trying to talk to a girl over music at the club.
2) Cruisin' down the street hollerin' out the window at. Or,
3) I was having too much fun to care. Like my friend P.Lo says, I get louder and louder as I have more fun.

By the way, how many shots are in a redbull and vodka? That ish is dangerous, mang.

On another point, Vancouver is tiiite! This weekend we went to this club Bar None off a tip from our bartender. Man! So many beautiful women and of course a couple of struggling b-list actors trying to look cooler than they really are. Bottom line, if you're in Vancouver and need a place to go out, go there. Just make sure to get there early. It's one of those clubs that everyone is trying to get into, and the bouncers know it.

So anyway, I'm not writing to tell you all about my weekend. As much as I'm sure you want to know about my personal life, we have better things to discuss. First off, let me revisit some topics I brought up earlier and promised to follow up on.

A couple of weeks ago we had a question of quality versus quantity for the pictures on our site. On our website we have a choice; should we focus on putting up pictures that have excellent quality but perhaps are harder to get our hands on, or should we focus on providing an abundant supply of pictures with somewhat lowered quality. Well we talked about it, and we decided to go down the quality route.

Basically, we decided that the quality of our pictures is critical for you to be able to get a good look at the fashion items that you like. You know...for example, if you like a handbag that Gwen Stefani is holding, you need to be able to tell what material the handbag is. If there is something cool about the strap...you need to know. So from this point forward we might be a little slower in getting fresh content up, but don't be scurred, it's only because we're trying to keep the quality as high as possible, not because we've forgotten about you.

Aight, next point. A little while back, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do to promote our site. We haven't decided yet, but tonight Fu, Dirty, and I will be knocking heads on it. I think you can safely rule out any ideas containing public nudity or raves in the downtown Los Angeles business district. I don't know what we were smoking when we came up with those ideas, but clearly I need to get some of that Blueberry yum yum again cause we were definitely twisted. As much as I love the movie Old School and would love to be "Frank the Tank", we decided we could run FLOSS IN STYLE better from home than from jail. So anyway...scrap those ideas.

Now that we've gotten that stuff out of the way, let's talk about some new stuff. So we've decided it's time for us to ramp up the number of suggested items. We're going to start hiring people to put them up. In a couple of weeks you should start to see the number of suggested items on the site go way up. I think now we have about 500. That should roughly double.

Oh...before I forget, let me take a moment to thank SexyFLOSSinGal. She was our first hire here at FLOSS IN STYLE and she's doing an excellent job at putting up suggested items. If you thought that SexyFLOSSinGal was a random person, it isn't. She's on our team.

So yeah, we think we need more suggested items. We've got pictures, but you don't come to our website just for the pictures. If you just wanted pictures you could always go to a celebrity picture site. But on FLOSS IN STYLE, you come to shop for gear so you can be flossin' in style. That's our job. We have to get items up on the site. So we're about to do that. Keep your eye out.

Aight, time to meet with the fellas and continue our promotion brainstorm.

keep flossin',
iji

Get a Free FLOSS In Style T-shirt!

Aight. So we're giving away some free FLOSS IN STYLE tshirts right now. We've hit the point where we need our users to answer some critical questions for us. We've mentioned this before, but the hardest part of doing our own project is that we have to figure out what we should be working on.

Unlike when you're working for someone, we have no boss that can tell us what to focus on. We have a lot of ideas we think are cool, and we could go off and start building all types of stuff. But the honest truth is that half the stuff we would build wouldn't even be necessary.

So we want feedback from our users, and we figured one of the best ways to get feedback is to give away something. What better to give away than our stylish t-shirts? Now first off, not everyone can get a t-shirt. So don't go telling you mom's cousin's sister's boyfriend's aunt to come check out FLOSS IN STYLE and take our survey, because only fifty people will get a free t-shirt.

Second we need you to fill out the entire survey to get the t-shirt. Therefore, don't just put in your address and then peace out, because we're not giving those people t-shirts. We need real answers. You know?

So far we only have a handful of people who are receiving the t-shirt, so as of the time of this writing we have over forty left. Here's the URL with the survey: http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=236284.

Fill it out and get your free t-shirt!!

keep flossin',
iji

Bringing our A Game

Man. We've just realized that we were losing some of the momentum we brought to the project in the earliest days of FLOSS IN STYLE. In the beginning we used to be straight soldiers. We'd be working on FLOSS IN STYLE until 4 in the morning almost every single night. I'd have to force myself to go to bed, and to realize this isn't college, and I can't just skip work like I used to skip classes.

Haha, that reminds me of the time in college that Fu and I saw the sun rise for 30 days in a row because we were politickin' every night. It's sad, because you would think we would have a reason right. Like maybe we had mad work to do. But nope. We were just downloading FinKL videos and playing trance music, haha. I'm sure if Bippy is reading this he's rollin'. Remeber that Bips? Haha.

But back to what I was saying. In the beginning of FLOSS IN STYLE, we'd be brainstorming on IM, on the phone, over email, over SMS. I mean it was non stop...we were just always thinking how can we make this site the best it can be.

Now, we think we're slowing down a little bit. I mean don't get me wrong, we're still up all hours of the night. Just ask Fu. The guy is falling asleep on the phone these days because he's going so hardcore. You've gotta be damn tired to fall asleep on the phone...hahaha. And then we have Dirty, the guy is fixing FLOSS IN STYLE bugs during breaks at work. I’m like man, you gotta take it easy. But then I’m not one to talk, because I can't go 10 minutes without checking our traffic statistics, haha. So we're not slacking. But if we were working at 110% before, we've probably slid down to about 95% now.

And that's understandable. With the 2nd site launch this past Monday we have definitely earned a small break. We delivered some awesome features. Everyone is telling us the magnifier and the picture tooltips on the suggested items is off the chain. That's really good to hear, and gives us a great boost of energy.

However, we know that unless we keep bringing more and more goodness, then eventually FLOSS IN STYLE will just be another site with great potential that became a ghost town. That's what we DON'T want to see happen. We don't want to be that site that was tite back in the day. You know, that site where you tell your friend..."Yo remember FLOSS IN STYLE???", and your friend's like, "oh yeah, didn't we used to go to that site back when Clay Aiken was still hot?" Naw man, that won’t be us.

So we realized we have to keep the intensity up. We have to continue to bring our A game to the table. Otherwise, we’ll get lost amongst all the other noise out there.

So now, we're back in the lab and we've started to throw out the ideas again.

We're focused more on marketing than we ever were before. We've realized we have to do something grab attention. You know, we need to do something outlandish. We need some stuff that is going to make people say, "Damn, did you hear what those FLOSS IN STYLE guys did?"

Don’t ask us what we're going to do. We don’t know yet. We have a number of ideas. One of my favorites is throwing a rave in the middle of downtown LA with many scantily clad people during business hours (let us know if you want in). Other not so wise ideas are public nudity wearing nothing but black and red latex paint (If you haven’t already guessed, those are the FLOSS IN STYLE colors). Yeah, for some reason I don't think anyone wants to see the naked rear ends of me, Dirty, or Fu. We'll save the streaking for our over the hill “Old School” style fraternity.

So as you can see we're still far from having a good idea. We could probably use a little help. If you have any good ideas feel free to give us feedback. Here is a link: http://www.flossinstyle.com/FlossUtility/FeedbackForm.aspx

Aight. Well I guess I'm gonna call it quits for the night. It’s time to get back to my other job :).

keep flossin'
iji