[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) - Marketplace and search...
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Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) - Marketplace and search engine for
formalwear
Hey HN! I'm Kathy, cofounder and CTO of Queenly
(https://queenly.com/). We created a marketplace and search engine
for formal dresses (think wedding, prom, quinceanera, etc). Our
search and recommendations system focuses on showing the buyer
these products at the level of precision they are looking for, in
terms of body shape, color, style, height, skin color and fabric,
trained on the text and visual signals from our user-generated
content. It's always been a tricky process to find the perfect
dress. The women's formal wear industry has been decentralized and
offline for decades, fragmented across mom-and-pop boutique shops,
with sparse inventory available online and within department
stores. In other words, finding the perfect wedding gown or prom
dress meant driving for hours to different stores hoping these
stores carry your size or the style you want. This is especially
frustrating when that special occasion you are shopping for means
so much to you. Similarly, it's been tough to resell these items
after that special occasion is over, as buyers on generic
marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to not focus on giving a
safe and easy shopping experience for this type of inventory.
Moreover, it takes a lot longer to sell dresses on these platforms
since the buyers there have much lower intent on purchasing this
kind of inventory. Queenly attempts to solve that two-sided
problem. We've launched a web, iOS, and (pared-down) Android app
for consumers to upload their dresses that they no longer have a
user for and for small business owners to bulk upload their dress
inventory to help them generate more revenue. We're solving this
problem because of our personal backgrounds: Trisha and I are two
minority immigrant founders from low income families. For us,
having that transformative Cinderella dress was tremendously
meaningful but never truly attainable. My cofounder, an emancipated
youth, found her Cinderella opportunity through joining pageants
during college. For her and many young women, these pageants had
not only helped her personal growth, but also helped her pay
tuition and survive. This experience gave us both a strong pillar
of support and got her through tough times, and so we dedicated
ourselves to the mission of providing affordability and access to
dresses for young women. Through forging friendships with other
girls we met during pageants, and working with formalwear fashion
designers, we found solace in a diverse community of those trying
to push the boundaries of what it means to feel beautiful and
confident in the modern age, that such traits can come in all
shapes and sizes, and embracing them wholeheartedly. From this
experience, we understand that search precision for one's body
type, skin tone, height, and budget in this market is not a
secondary concern but rather a first-order necessity. The 50k+
dresses uploaded onto Queenly are indexed by color, fabric, dress
size, hemline, neckline, silhouette and sleeve length. In beta
testing now is searching by skin tone, filtering by height, and
computer vision image search. If you've experienced this
frustration buying or selling formal dresses, or know someone who
has, we would love to hear your feedback. We're very excited to be
sharing this with HN, and we'll be here to answer questions you
want to throw our way!
Author : kathyqueenly
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-03-13 23:30 UTC (23 hours ago)
| katehiscox wrote:
| Fantastic! Congrats Queenly team! Hardest workers in the room and
| a huge market. Quinceanera's alone!
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thanks! Quinceanera is super big but underserved. We hope to
| help provide more access and affordability to these big and
| celebratory dresses :)
| capiki wrote:
| Congrats on your launch! Your website is super straightforward
| and well-designed. Best of luck:)
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thank you!
| faitswulff wrote:
| This site would be great for a _lot_ of people I know. Being
| immigrants yourselves, are there any plans for adding support for
| ethnic formalwear or events? I 've been on the lookout for qipao
| (Chinese) and aodai (Vietnamese), for instance.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| This has been very top of mind actually! We have some users who
| have uploaded a lot of qipaos and aoi dais already. For
| immigrant women, it's difficult to find any formal cultural
| wear unless your town has a Chinatown or ethnic stores that
| cater to it. We want to provide easier access to this
| inventory, especially for those living in the Midwest/South,
| who normally would not have as many, if not any, ethnic stores
| that sell cultural formalwear. Thank you so much for
| recognizing this need for immigrants!
| pranshum wrote:
| Congratulations team! Rooting for you as loudly as I can!
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| We truly appreciate it!!
| spoonjim wrote:
| Looks like a cheap Shopify site that one guy selling woodworking
| tools in Nebraska would have, not a startup with top tier venture
| capital funding. Hire some better designers
| adav wrote:
| A Shopify site would probably be a decent MVP...
|
| This is the second Launch HN in the last few days (the other
| being that macOS meeting widget one) that has left me
| absolutely baffled as to what YC saw/sees in it.
| adav wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean my comment to come off so negatively. I
| do wish the team the best of luck and think that reimagining
| aspects of the fashion industry is a very worthy ambition.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Haha thank you. For context, we launched on iOS, Android,
| and web within the same year, which has helped our
| marketplace grow, but we've since realized that we are
| outgrowing our engineering capacity (all done by me, a
| proud but headstrong full stack engineer ). Definitely
| maintaining a high sense of UX quality is one of our
| priorities, especially as we are trying to hire and
| dedicate better engineering resources to this challenge.
| Please let us know if you have specific feedback on the
| design!
| fakedang wrote:
| I'm curious, which framework are you using?
| [deleted]
| gokulj wrote:
| Congratulations and Good Luck! Curious about your tech
| stack choices that allowed you to cover iOS, Android and
| Web, with a team of one!
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| hi kathy, congratulations on the site launch. there's one
| thing that stood out when I opened the site that you
| might want to take a look at. the 'onmouseout' behavior
| on the menu at the top seems like it needs to be reworked
| a little bit, because there is a tendency for the submenu
| to get 'stuck'. (its especially noticable if the mouse is
| in that position when the page loads). here's what i mean
| specifically: https://i.imgur.com/mbMnm4R.gif
|
| second, i don't know if this is just my browser, but the
| images associated with step 1/2/3 (step 2 is missing) are
| vertically stretched kind of wrong, e.g.
| https://i.imgur.com/Hr63i0q.png
|
| other than that, i strongly commend you for not using
| some kind of auto-hiding animation on the sticky header.
| and also not using animations in general. good call.
| analog31 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Here's a niche worth looking into: Women's attire for formal
| music recitals and performances. My experience is limited to
| being a parent of a classical music student. Every musician ends
| up needing a variety of outfits for performances of different
| kinds, and for women, a solo performance tends to demand
| something akin to a formal dress. Shopping for such a thing is a
| pain in the arse, but they'll buy one and wear it over an over if
| it works.
|
| In addition to looking good, the dress has to _work_ meaning that
| it can 't interfere with playing an instrument or singing. Not
| having ever worn such a thing, I can't guess what is needed, but
| there are endless performance videos on YouTube of concert
| performers, and you can imagine that someone like Hilary Hahn has
| figured out what works by now.
|
| Dresses that fit younger girls would also be a thing.
|
| Being a male musician, I'm kind of lucky that I can get away with
| something that's 100% generic. I bought a used tuxedo, almost a
| quarter century ago, and have worn it hundreds of times. Every
| musician male or female, also owns a set of "concert black,"
| which is black shirt and black pants.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Oh also, we thought of this when we met a user on our platform
| asking about attire for ice skating competitions! We figured
| that we can also expand this to competition / performance wear
| like what you had mentioned. We started talking to some users
| who perform as ballroom dancers, pianists, etc., and they all
| told us how expensive these garments are and how difficult it
| is to find them online. Thank you so much for this
| recommendation, we really wanna work hard this year to expand
| to this fully.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| This is a fantastic recommendation! Thank you :)
| ahstilde wrote:
| Really cool to see! Congrats on the launch!
|
| > buyers on generic marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to
| not focus on giving a safe and easy shopping experience for this
| type of inventory
|
| Can you speak towards what you do to improve the buyer / seller
| experience for these sorts of items?
| neximo64 wrote:
| It feels like having a marketplace for this cheapens the
| experience of using formalwear. Imo
|
| I would try and find a way to change the experience so its not
| similar to buying stuff on Ebay (i.e the homepage feels that way)
| faitswulff wrote:
| If you want the experience of brand new formalwear, then the
| site is likely not for you.
|
| Coming from an immigrant family myself, the utility of
| something is worth more than the perceived newness, and deal
| hunting is a prized skill. Queenly is a good match for
| demographics like that.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Definitely a tricky design challenge, to keep a playful but
| high end tone to the landing page!
| bruckie wrote:
| "Playful" isn't really something I'd expect from a business
| like this, at least not at the expense of communicating "high
| end".
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Prom is supposed to be fun, but prom dresses are expensive!
| ftio wrote:
| Showed Queenly to my wife, and it clicked with her instantly. She
| reminisced about having to get several catalogs to find the right
| prom dress.
|
| We both _love_ the name, although if I 'm being honest I think
| the brand colors and fonts could be elevated in order to more
| meaningfully distinguish yourself from eBay and your other non-
| verticalized competitors (who all seem to have kind of tech-y,
| too-fun brands).
|
| Some feedback on your positioning:
|
| 1. It wasn't immediately clear whether Queenly was a marketplace,
| a store, or some mix of both. This matters to us because it helps
| set our expectations around the buying experience.
|
| 2. Since some photos were stock photos, we wondered whether a
| seller could send you a dirty dress (or nothing at all). We found
| the answer (dry cleaning!) in your FAQ. In our eyes, this is a
| big differentiator vs eBay or similar. Might be worth
| highlighting that more prominently.
|
| In general, it looks like you have a great product that solves a
| real problem. I know homepage real estate is at a premium, and
| you probably want to highlight inventory, but it might be worth
| doing a little more selling in the early days to explain why
| you're different. On a hunch, I checked out what StockX did to
| thread this needle a few years ago. I think their approach is
| elegant:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170216204356/https://stockx.co...
|
| CCongrats and good luck!
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| For context on 1. We do indeed have both resale dresses as well
| as mom and pop dress boutiques with brand new inventory on our
| platform. The latter arose during the pandemic, as many of
| those shops unfortunately closed down and had to find a way to
| integrate their inventory online. It's definitely a tricky UX
| challenge, to communicate the availability of both types of
| products on one platform. On this topic as well as the
| FAQ/dress cleaning subject, taking inspiration from how
| streetwear marketplaces is a great suggestion.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| Good luck with your product! Just one suggestion about the
| website colours: the contrast between background and text is very
| poor in some places - you have a deep green background with a
| brown text.
|
| If I were you I would pay a professional designer to work on
| that.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thank you for the constructive feedback! Would you happen to
| have a link to the page or a screenshot of the color contrast
| issue? Appreciate the detailed feedback!
| amir734jj wrote:
| Congratulations on the lunch. Upvote!
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thank you!
| kposehn wrote:
| Go Queenly! Happy to see the product launch.
| kathyqueenly wrote:
| Thanks so much!
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(page generated 2021-03-14 23:03 UTC)