One of the biggest industry is the fashion industry. Why? Everyone wants to look good, and a good fashion sense is the best way to let you achieve that.
Fashion e-commerce website has been set up and racking in a lot of revenue from users. Although these site are fairly popular among internet shoppers, they do not help shoppers discover and check out what are their peers wearing. After having identified this gap, Taiwan based Alvin Woon created and launched RE.MU in 2012.
What exactly is RE.MU? RE.MU is an online community of fashionista sharing their virtual closets with one another. To find out more about this interesting concept, Vulcan Post speaks toTina Cheng, Strategic Partner Relations for RE.MU to learn more.
Tell us more about RE.MU: What can users do on RE.MU now and which features are the most popular features on RE.MU?
RE.MU is a style sharing site and our users can upload pictures of their clothes, accessories, entire outfits..etc to the app. We have about 30 categories such as pants, tank top, shoes, even pets and gadgets, to help users keep track and organize what they own. We also have one category called “combination”, where user can upload an entire outfit to showcase her style.
There’s a heavy focus on social networking, so users can comment and “like” other users’s photos. They can also search for a specific user or particular brand, or style. For example, they can search zara, or black dress.
Search is a very popular function and we see there’s a real need from users to look for certain brand or find out how to style a specific item.
Is the fashion discovery space too crowded? How does RE.MU stand out?
We think style-sharing should be fun, and it reflects on many of the online and offline events that we host, as well as our user photos. You will find many funny and silly photos that you probably won’t find in other style sharing sites. Here are a few examples:
We also designed RE.MU to be appealing to an international audience: When a user logs in to RE.MU, she or he will immediately notices that the user-community is consisted of fashionista not just from one specific country, but across the globe. Some of RE.MU’S most active users are from Taiwan, Thailand, Chile, Mexico, US, and China. Very few fashion sites can achieve such diversity and this is definitely one of the key trait that sets us apart from our competitors.
We are also community-Driven: Many style sharing sites are eager to monetize and their user interface looks like brand catalogue, pushing users to shop online. RE.MU, on the other hand, is much more community-driven which enables authentic and fun interaction among users. We’ve also been very successful in hosting offline marketing events for users to take part in fashion-related fun activities, which further strengthen user-engagement.
Finally, we differentiate ourselves by engaging users through offline events: RE.MU enjoys having fun with users in live events and create opportunity to let users meet each other. Recently we invited users to do a photo shoot and the goal was to make fun of some of the bad fashion photos featured on fashion magazines. We asked a fashion blogger who’s known for mean, sarcastic comments to do a story on our event. The results? Her article went viral and nearly tripled our users sign-ups.
Our fun attitude toward fashion and our vibrant, engaged community is one of the key trait that sets us apart from our competitors.
Oh we have a mobile app as well, allowing users to share and discover fashions on the go:
Tell us more about the team behind RE.MU, how did you all meet and why did you all decide to start RE.MU?
RE.MU is founded by Alvin Woon in 2012, a serial entrepreneur whose claim to fame is the founding of the popular micro-blogging site Plurk back in 2008. Plurk is similar to Twitter, and is Taiwan’s very own home grown product.
Alvin’s success as a serial entrepreneur led him to become one of the 4 partners at venture capital firm TMI Holdings. Alvin started RE.MU because he notices that whenever girls get together, they are always talking about clothes, fashion, make-up, or sharing what shoes they bought lately. Alvin thought it’d be interesting to create an app that enable users to upload their clothes, shoes, bags et cetera into one central location.
Not only will this help users keep track of what they own, but it also is a fun way for friends to check out each other’s fashion possession and styles. As simple as that, RE.MU is born!
At first, Alvin was working on RE.MU all by himself, including developing the web version and apps at the same time. Later on he brought on an intern from TMI to help him with marketing and promotion of RE.MU. In less than a year, the intern, Emily, a recent university graduate, managed to grow RE.MU’s facebook fan page to 100,000+ fans and created a vibrant community for RE.MU. That’s when Alvin decided to ask Emily to become the co-founder of RE.MU. Of course she said yes!
In addition to 2 founders, there are 2 marketing staff, Tina and Zoe, helping with growing the RE.MU community and international expansion. (We are looking for talented app developers so send your resume!)
You mentioned that RE.MU is looking to expand to other markets, how are you guys doing this and which market are you guys looking at?
We are doing mostly through marketing, engaging the local fashion community, media, and most importantly, the users. We are now looking at Southeast Asia and the US as the main targets for expansion.
How do you all make money through RE.MU?
At the moment we are focusing on international expansion and user acquisition. We see multiple monetization models in the future, including affiliate marketing, providing marketing services to fashion brands, becoming a platform where fashion designers can promote and sell to a targeted group of international users, or community-based marketplaces, where users promote and sell directly to other users.
Tell us about the name, what does it mean and how did it came about?
We get this questions a lot, but actually there’s no specific “meaning” in RE.MU, we were just looking for a 4-letter word that’s easy to remember 😉
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