COODE: Professional Stylists Answer Fashion Questions With Digital Collages

COODE is a fashion Q＆A site that was launched on September 7th. We have seen online collage website such as Polyvore, and there is a Japanese version of the same service called iQon. iQon started in April 2010 and has so far received 140 million yen in investment (about $1.8 million).

What makes COODE different from rest of these services is its Q&A approach. Users can ask each other questions about fasion, and to answer, they create online collages using all sorts of fashion items. Another strengh of COODE is that it has professional stylists answering those questions. In that sense, it’s similar to Shoedazzle. The items in the collage can be also bought online from the brand’s website.

Some examples of questions asked would be:

“I just bought a camel fur scarf. How would I wear this to work?”
or
“I just dyed my hair back to black, what style do you think will go well with it?” 

Many users ask for advice for appropriate clothing styles to suit different occasions. There is an interesting use case where one user asked others to coordinate his fashion style, and he ended up getting many answers from his friends. One of the suggestions looked like this.

Each user is given their own profile page, which includes an introduction, type of fasion with their strong points, favorite magazine, Twitter or Facebook accounts, and a blog URL. Users’ questions, answers, and the people they follow can be viewed as well.

Answers to a question can be rated with a Nice! button. And in the sidebar, there is a weekly ranking of users according to their Nice count.  COODE creates its own original content too by interviewing the most popular user of the month.  Some features in development are a “best answer” feature and a commenting feature.  COODE also plans to use the Yahoo! Chiebukuro API (Q&A basically) which receives 3,000-5,000 questions per day.

For now the revenue is generated by advertising and through affiliates. COODE is created by PlayMined, which is led by 28 years old Mitsutaka Hamada. The start-up’s goal is to have 10,000 registered users within a year. We can expect to see iPhone and Android apps early next year.