Over 80% of the clothes women aren’t wearing is worth half a trillion dollars in the US according to Finery founder and CEO Whitney Casey. Finery, which was just listed in CNBC’s Upstart 100 list of promising young startups, keeps track of all your clothing purchases and creates a digital wardrobe and then helps style you in the clothes you already own.
Whitney Casey, founder, and CEO of Finery discussed her company’s service and business model in a recent interview:
Finery is a Digital Wardrobe
Finery is a digital wardrobe. What we do is we find all of your purchases, from your e-receipts, from your browser history, from attaching your accounts, and then we instantly upload all of those items into a virtual closet so you can see everything you own. We have a bunch of tools on the site that can help you add items easily. You Google anything, you find the image, you push the little ‘F’ browser button and it uploads to your closet. That’s our tech. We go back ten years into your purchase history to find and call all those receipts and put it into this closet for you. The bigger picture of this is really about data and that’s the ethos that this company is built off of.
We let you also take your account and upload your accounts such as Neiman Marcus, Target, or whatever. The data is really important and when we talk about data we tell women that we really think that your data should be working for you. It should not be working for Facebook. Women are the consumers with 85 percent of the consumer goods purchased by women. Yet, 91 percent of women say they don’t feel like advertisers or anyone really understand them.
Why Do Women Need Finery?
What’s great is we style you. A woman will spend eight years of her life shopping and two years getting dressed, we’re shaving the time off that. We also give you a return receipt. So think about this, you buy something and you have seven days left so you can no longer return, you need to know that so we ping you. Hey, it’s raining outside, here are five things you can wear from your closet. Hey, it’s Sunday, you have four interviews this week so here are five outfits for you from your closet.
We have hundreds of thousands of users currently. But we have a big vision and it is around data because we really do feel like women need to have their data working for them. It’s very hard actually to get data from women because they don’t want this same purple boot following them around the internet like it does (via behavioral ads) for two years that they bought. Instead, they really want their data to be working for them and that’s what we’re doing.
When you log in to a retail site why does it do you any good to log in with your Facebook account? It only does Facebook good so they can then advertise to you. What we want to do is create a login from your Finery account so that all of your data can come with you and then it could make your purchasing way easier.
How Does Finery Make Money?
We offer a rev share, we call it a knowledge tax. Companies pay us to give women a personalization lifeline. When you go to these retailers it’s not very easy, you sift through all of these pages. If you think about it, the service, the flywheel of giving women some utility and they give us more access to themselves and every time access makes the utility better.
It’s crazy because 80% of the clothes you aren’t wearing is worth half a trillion dollars in the US. If we put RFID tags in all of your clothes we would we could know exactly where you’re wearing them and exactly the amount of time you’re wearing them and then break the cost. Via a consignment site, you could then just tap on any item in your wardrobe and then sell it. It all starts in your wardrobe, all of these all of these functionalities, re-commerce, commerce, rentals, it all has to start with the clothes that you own.