Clothe to Me is an app that gives you the opportunity of having all your dressing registered on your mobile phone, and therefore to choose your look very quickly.
It also gives you the chance to have your outfit of the day directly choosen by the application, so that fashionistas who don’t have any time to loose, or have a lot of clothes in their wardrobe without having any idea of what to wear, it really is a dreamed application…
Even if this is such a great idea, and even if it was one of the first of the market, the concept has been taken by other applications like My Outfit, which proposes you quite the same concept. We met the founders of Clothe to Me, who kindly answered our questions:
Who are you ? Tell us about your story
We are two collaborators, Valérie and Adeline. We have been friends for more than 4 years, and we both are passionate by fashion and new technologies.
Valerie is a product designer, she worked in video games, art, and the animated film sector. Adeline is more focused on fashion; as she worked for women’s magazines, and has been responsible of one of the Maje’s shop. So we have allied both of our capacities, fashion and technic, to found Clothe to Me. When we thought about this concept, we were surprised that nothing already exists about it. So we wanted to develop an efficient, useful and nice app by allying our skills.
Describe us the arrival of your idea, tell us about the development of your start up.
We both were always late for the same reasons, we never knew what to wear even if we both have full wardrobes. One day we decided that this couldn’t last. We started to make researches to know if there was an application to answer to this problem. We all spend all of our days on our mobile phones, so why not having our dressing on it? We both had an experience in the sector of fashion and mobile phone applications, so we thought we could make something really cool, useful and performing. We have seen the movie “Clueless”, and this has acted like a revelation! We just had to start working to create Clothe to Me. We created the start up in August 2014, we surrounded ourselves with a great team, and we have built our application during a few months. The test version was available in November 2014, and after the analysis of the first comments and reactions, we launched the official version in January 2015.
How does it work exactly ?
The utilization of Clothe to Me is really easy. To complete your virtual dressing, you just have to take a picture of all your clothes, and to give them a category with an icon, a season, a style or a color. The application will crop the clothes and put it in the virtual dressing – which you can see at anytime. Then the consumer can create her looks by scrolling the clothes of her dressing, until she is satisfied, or she can choose the option “quick a look”, which gives her automatically some looks depending of her needs. Clothe to me also gives you suggestions depending on the weather, every day. Quite awesome, isn’t it ?
Your best and worse memory about being a contractor ?
We have a lot of good memories and we hope we will have a lot more! Our best souvenirs are the “Creative Party” organized by KissKissBankBank and Glamour. It was the first time we could talk about our project and we noticed that a lot of people found it interesting! The second best souvenir was when we won the “Clinique FaceForward” (15000€ !!) We were working on this challenge since a few months and we were four groups challenging each other. During the afternoon, the oral was intense, so we were very proud to win !
At the opposite, there is no worst memory: of course we had some hard times, but this is what makes the experience that interesting. It gives you the opportunity to refocus and analyzed all the things we’ve done.
How did you find this idea for your name ?
We were looking for an international catchy name, so we started to reference all the words that made us think about clothes in French and English. Adeline’s father, English teacher, loves wordplay, and wanted to help us. So we gave him our words list. Clothe to Me went out (close to me – clothe to me), and we loved it because it’s exactly our concept. He is very proud about it, and we are proud of our name!
Your typical day ?
We meet at Saint Paul, at Valerie’s place, to work. Yet we don’t have any offices for us, so we work at home. The day always start with a coffee, we drink a lot of coffee at Clothe to Me! We talk about our objectives for the day, as it we are organized and we don’t waste time. Valerie takes care of the artistic and technic direction, and Adeline of the communication.
Every day is different, and full of opportunities! We can stay home where we have everything to work, or being everywhere in Paris for meetings.
Any advices for young entrepreneurs?
Never give up! To create your start up is a full time experience but it’s glorifying ! There are good times and bad times. Choose a good team, define correctly your project and the way you see its evolution, believe in yourself and see this experience as a marathon and not a sprint.
Your goals for next year ?
We would like to improve the existing version with options that allowed you to have all the things to know about the clothes at the same place. With Clothe to Me, the consumers could buy clothes directly on the website, and use them everyday, and at the same time being inspired and re sell them on a market place if they want.
We would like to finish a fundraising, to launch other projects thanks to the “studio Clothe to Me”, the creation and development service of the application. A lot of things to come !
As a girl who love clothes but who can’t tidy up her clothes and match them in less than one hour, it’s for me a very interesting concept which is worth it… And for those who have even less time to spend on their everyday outfit, you will soon be able to buy and resell directly your clothes on the application, with no need to switch apps! Quite interesting evolutions to come in the next few months…