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