Toronto startup Pin & Tucker is betting on mobile as the ultimate connector between consumers, community and clothing retailers.
The new mobile fashion app recently came out with a working beta last week, and aims to tackle the problem of lost sales in retail fitting rooms across the globe. You know the grind: spot a few things that look nice on a hanger, take the loot to the fitting room only to discover that nothing fits quite in a way you imagined.
But now you can snap that classic fitting room selfie and ask friends and occasionally even strangers for help. In essence, Pin & Tucker aspires to be your “best friend” in the changeroom. Shoppers get a place to upload their photos and have Pin & Tucker community and friends vote on the look. Brands get a way to offer special discounts, suggestions to complete the look and other creative tips that would drive sales.
Tracie Wagman is a well-known face in the Toronto startup and mompreneur community as CEO of Help We’ve Got Kids. She teamed up with Anthula Nunes, who owns the Canvas Malibu boutique, to get the Pin & Tucker app going just a few months ago.
“We both worked in retail before, and we noticed how nobody is helping people in fitting room anymore. When there’s nobody there, how can retailers close that sale?” Wagman told BetaKit. “We spent literally hundreds of hours in retail stores watching consumers and felt it was an underserved market, and we felt brands weren’t doing enough to reach consumers when they were open and ready to buy. Anthula and I are huge fashion lovers, techies, and shoppers – so this became a passion of ours to combine all of our skills and do what we love.”
About 70 per cent of customers are converted into buyers in the fitting room, according to an Envision Retail study. Meanwhile Oxford Dictionary named “selfie” a word of the year in 2013. As well, smartphone penetration around the world keeps growing. Wagman and Nunes saw this as a perfect storm and business opportunity worth pursuing.
Now they want to connect retailers and consumers in real time through the app to help drive sales.
If Pin & Tucker succeeds in building a strong community and platform, and partners with the right brands, the opportunities for retailers to reduce returns, monitor sales conversion and hyper-target consumers can be attractive. The real genius of Pin & Tucker is leveraging the fact that peer recommendations carry ten times more weight with consumers than recommendations from salespeople.
After all, who likes making crucially important decisions on their own?
Looking fabulous is hard work.