Mountain View, California — Just in time for the holiday shopping season, in a move that marks Google’s attempts to keep its users informed about latest fashion trends and provide shopping recommendations, the Internet search engine giant on Wednesday sauntered into the world of haute couture with the launch of boutiques.com, an online shopping venture that analyzes women’s tastes and allows them to browse selections from fashion insiders.
The move propels Google into the online fashion industry, along with eBay and Amazon.com.
Style-savvy US women can now create their own online boutiques or browse collections “curated by taste-makers” such as celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers, wrote Munjal Shah, a Google product management director, in a blog post.
“Nowadays, bloggers, stylists and haute couture designers are exhibiting their sense of style online. We invited them to create boutiques so people could shop their diverse styles. But you have a unique and independent style too, so Boutiques also lets you build your own personalized boutique and get recommendations of products that match your taste,” Shah added.
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According to Google, Boutiques.com is a site that bundles together computing power and fashion savoir-faire, and thus helps users “find and discover fashion goods.”
In a blog post Shah explained that the site has been in the works for 18 months with the ultimate objective of uncovering a new way to browse, discover and shop for soft goods online.
However, the programmers and developers will not design clothes for Boutiques; and the site will essentially feature shops “curated” by celebrities, designers, stylists, and fashion bloggers. These tastemakers curate up to 50 items they like by answering questions about colors, patterns, brands, silhouettes and style genres they prefer.
As of now, the site features boutiques from actress Carey Mulligan, singer Eve, and stylist Nicole Chavez, along with those from nearly 30 other people. Other features include advanced search filters, inspiration photos, and an iPad app. Users can “follow” and be followed by boutiques on the site.
According to Google, machine learning technology visually analyzes a users’ taste to match it to items he or she will (presumably) like in the future. The site is perfectly well organized to let users filter their searches by size, silhouette, patterns and colors.
Google also is offering what it has dubbed as “inspirational photos.” If a user searches for brown boots, photos will pop up on the right showing brown boots with matching outfits. And, anecdotally at least, users are keen on the concept: What started out as several hundred boutiques had grown to several thousand within hours of launch, Google says.
“In fashion, there are lots of choices,” Shah said. “This site had to be collaboration.”
For instance, if a user trying to figure out what to pair with a particular top or pair of pants, Google turned to people in the fashion industry to first give Google hundreds of style rules, such as not mixing stripes with patterns. Then the company turned to its developers to design computer programs that use those fashion rules to suggest matching items to users.
“They did this by telling us what colors, patterns, brands and silhouettes they loved and they hated,” Shah said.
“Our machine learning algorithms use this information to enable you to shop all of the inventory in the style of that taste-maker, on top of the 50 items they have hand curated.” Boutiques uses computer vision and machine learning technologies to match a woman’s tastes with clothing or accessories that she might find tempting, Shah added.
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research, said that Google is smart to get into e-commerce, especially before the holiday shopping season, but he noted that this idea is still a bit out there, even for Google.
“I mean, it is never a surprise when Google gets into something new,” he said. “But it seems a bit off from their traditional business. You can say it seems like out of left field for Google, but their left field has become much bigger than others.”
Shah further added that the team behind Boutiques.com is the product of Like.com — an online retailer which was snapped by Google in August — and was already, before the Google acquisition, thinking of ways to create a better online shopping experience for people.
Currently, Boutiques.com is available only in the US for women’s fashion. However, Google is likely to expand the availability of the site in the near future, as well as launch an iPad application too but did not provide a time frame.