Chicisimo.com

I am continuing in giving account of IE Managing Technology Start-Ups classes. This time IE hosted Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, serial entrepreneur with experience from the Silicon Valley, who talked about his latest project Chicisimo. The whole idea started as Gabriel and his wife revealed a group of girls, who took a picture of them every morning to share how they will be dressed that day. They posted their pictures on Flickr and hence generate traffic to their profile pages. Gabriel was thinking how to leverage this idea and eventually came up with a photo sharing platform dedicated to fashion.

The users of Chicisimo are fashion conscious girls some of them perhaps wannabe models with 17-25 years living in large urban areas. I have spotted large concentration of users from Spain, but they are also plenty of them from the UK, USA, Germany and the rest of the developed world. Currently, there are not many users from the fashion metropolises of Japan and China, most likely due to the language limitation. This is fact is a bit disturbing as the new fashion trends are more and more being created in Asia. Hence, capturing Asian market would create interesting synergy and source of inspiration for the users.

Gabriel is exploring more ways to monetize the platform in the future. At the moment, he focuses on expanding the user base in order to create sizeable community. The monetization could come in various ways. I can think of following revenue streams:

• Generating leads to Fashion Web Shops
• Selling advertising space
• Promoting certain brands via campaigns (e.g. picture yourself with anything from Burberry and win …)
• Selling statistics / reports about fashion trends and market development

Indeed, the market seems to be very promising as number of fashion buyers at the web ranked second in Europe in 2010 (Nielsen). Moreover, the online fashion shops market in the USA amounted $30b in 2010 and fashion advertisers spent $4b in 2009 on ads in US printed journals (Forrester and Magazine Publishers of America).

I think that Chicisimo is on promising path to success. The feature, which is now painfully missing at the platform is existence of a comprehensive regularly updated fashion product catalogue. With such a catalogue, user would not only identify the brand she wears, but a particular product, which would be linkable to the web shop generating lead revenue for Chicisimo. On the other hand, I understand that creating such a catalogue means entering into negotiation with more than 400 brands that are currently represented at Chicisimo so that time will be needed.

In conclusion, Gabriel needs to attract four groups of people to make Chicisimo a success users, fashion brands, fashion journalists, and investors. You need to have a great product to create a community of users. However, users do not directly influence corporate fashion brands, journalists or investors so that with users Gabriel is still half way through.