Sramana Mitra: What are you able to do? What strategies do you follow to make that an instant fit in some sense on the mobile phone? Darren Hill: If you think about products, products have attributes and tags. The consumer uses those tags to find products on the website. The biggest thing we’re doing is tagging the customer.
Sramana Mitra: One question on Nasty Gal and the scalability point, what are the issues? What are we trying to solve? Darren Hill: The issue is making sure the site is up. It works for all of your customers and they’re getting the environment that they’re expecting. For us, it’s really a technology play. Our
Sramana Mitra: How do you do the recommendation on what goes with what? Is that a manual recommendation system or is there technology that enables scaling of something like that? Darren Hill: It’s a mix. There are several data points that go into it such as what people have bought and what they have looked at. That’s the easy
Sramana Mitra: I see it. Darren Hill: It’s quite powerful. People share them like crazy. Our site allows hearting and comments and the customer base is very active. Sramana Mitra: Interesting. When you put something up on the website, I’m sure you are seeing huge amounts of social media sharing. Darren Hill: Absolutely. That is the
Sramana Mitra: Besides geography, what other parameters do you personalize on? Darren Hill: For a lot of our fashion clients, we personalize on sizes. For instance, if you have come to the website and you’ve looked for a specific pair of shoes, we’ll actually tag your account and we’ll know what shoe size you are. So
Sramana Mitra: Let’s fast forward to 2014. What is your business today? Darren Hill: 2014 is an interesting transitional year for us. We had been in business for 20 years. All of the growth that we had, which was pretty significant, was organic. We invested all of our profits back into the business and never
As you know, I am deeply interested in personalization as it applies to e-commerce & Web 3.0. In this interview, Darren Hill and I discuss the subject at length, especially as it pertains to fashion e-commerce, another area of significant interest for me. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well