Asians love celebrity gossip. They also love to shop for fashion. In fact, just about the only thing they love more than celebrity gossip is fashion ecommerce. At least that’s the belief of Juliette Gimenez, co-founder and CEO of a brand new startup called Goxip. It has a mobile app that lets users search and shop for fashion products based on celebrities’ styles.
The Hong Kong-based startup aggregates celeb content from traditional media, social media, and user generated content. Via Goxip, users are able to shop on Zalora, TopShop, Shopbop, and other fashion estores, in search of stuff resembling what the movie stars are wearing.
“I enjoy keeping up with pop culture but hate having to jump back and forth between celebrity news sites and Twitter to check for quick updates,” explains Gimenez. “People follow celebrities to live vicariously through them; they want to have the same bag or the same pair of shades, so we decided to include a visual search function and give users the opportunity to shop [for] their favorite looks.”
On Goxip, users can also snap and upload images of clothing and the app will use photo recognition tech to determine what type of item it is. Based on what it sees, the app will recommend similar clothes from various sites (it will also offer up the exact item if it can). Users can make purchases inside the app, without having to venture to the third party’s ecommerce site.
Users can also browse celebrity “style feeds” on Goxip, a collection of Hollywood stars featured on media like Huffington Post, TMZ, and Hollywoodlife. The style feeds offer up fashion ideas and let users shop for lookalike items. Searches can be refined by adding specific brands, colors, and price points. Goxip is also a social network in which users can create “shoppable mood boards” and follow others within the app’s trendy playground.
See: With celebs at the helm, 8wood challenges Indonesia’s big fashion estores
China first, then Indonesia
The company is brand new, and hasn’t raised any funding yet. While it only has vague plans to “enter the Indonesian market” at this point, I still found Goxip’s concept interesting because it falls in line with a trend we’re seeing in the archipelago. There are a several other local tech startups trying to capitalize on celebrity content for ecommerce in similar ways as Goxip, many with mixed results and some which have yet to yield fruit.
“We felt the Indonesian market is still about a year away,” Gimenez tells Tech in Asia. “That’s why we are going [to] China first. […] Although we don’t have an office there in Indonesia, we are looking at Indonesian celebrity content.”
In China, there are 400 million Android users Gimenez hopes to tap. She also hopes to integrate Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo into Goxip. According to her, combining these resources would add up to 700 million monthly active users. In the future, the Goxip team also aims to add new features like price alerts for wishlist items on sale.
Trendy competition afoot
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