SAN FRANCISCO — A couple of years ago, Deena Varshavskaya, the founder of a social shopping site, went through what she called a “Steve Jobs phase,” wearing a single T-shirt: a lightweight, cotton J. Crew V-neck in different colors.
“I’m a perpetual optimizer,” Ms. Varshavskaya said, “so that was my optimization of fashion.”
Sitting in the glass-walled private dining room of Roka Akor, a Japanese restaurant in the Jackson Square neighborhood of San Francisco, she smiled and glanced down at her outfit, which included a sheer-paneled dress by Cushnie et Ochs and neon pink Jimmy Choos. “Clearly, it didn’t work for very long,” she said.
These days, Ms. Varshavskaya’s wardrobe includes Lucite heels, rabbit-hair sweaters and zany leggings. Last year, while speaking at a TechCrunch conference, she wore a pair of leggings festooned with kittens that had laser beams coming out of their eyes. “It was great,” she said. “It just made me feel very good, very creative, about being there.”
Championing creativity could be the mantra of Ms. Varshavskaya, 34, and her three-year-old Wanelo, a mash-up of the words “want,” “need” and “love” (and pronounced WAH-nee-loh). A virtual catalog of more than 12 million products from 300,000 stores, Wanelo re-creates the experience of browsing through a mall or boutique, and stumbling upon must-haves.
More than 11 million users, most of them women, create wish lists and follow one another, as well as brands and stores, to find new stuff to covet. And unlike Pinterest or Instagram, every product on Wanelo is linked to an online store where it can be bought. For those who love to shop, it’s the stuff addictions are made of.
“It’s really frustrating when you’re in shopping mode and you want to go to buy something and it’s a blog article or a picture on Flickr,” said Bridget Dolan, the vice president for digital marketing at Sephora, which will add Wanelo social- sharing buttons to its site this month, so that users can share products on Wanelo the same way they would on Facebook or Twitter. “People are coming in with Instagram saying, ‘Can I get this look?’ but with Wanelo, they’re coming in and saying, ‘This is my list, I want to buy these items,’ ” she said. “That’s what I think makes Wanelo so unique. It’s like, let’s just cut to the chase and get shopping going here.”
Allowing online shoppers to share items they want to buy with their social networks has “gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have,” said Harley Finkelstein, the chief platform officer for Shopify, a commerce platform that powers more than 100,000 online stores. “People by nature will trust their friends a lot more than they will trust a stranger or an ad,” he said. “If a friend tells you that dress you shared looks great, your propensity to buy that dress goes up substantially.”
Ms. Varshavskaya, a voracious devourer of things, came late to fashion. Born in Siberia, the daughter of a political journalist in Communist Russia, she grew up, she said, “questioning everything.” She spent her childhood immersing herself in intellectual pursuits, like reading through the entire works of Dostoyevsky at age 13. At 16, her father relocated her to New Jersey, a move she called “a huge culture shock.”
“I felt that environment was not conducive to me, and I wasn’t finding the passion I was looking for,” she said. New York City seemed more her speed. She moved there to start her first company, Reel Act, a video directory of headshots and clips for actors. “The longer I went on, it just became obvious that there was no need for me to go back,” she said, referring to college.
When Reel Act folded two years later, she moved to Los Angeles and worked on designing websites, first for a social network called Tag World and then for her own agency, Dynamik, which by 2010 had seven employees and clients like Nickelodeon, Disney and Toyota.
It was around this time that Ms. Varshavskaya started getting into shoe-buying. Or tried to, at least. “I’d go to the malls and it would be frustrating,” she said. “The selection was so predictable. I realized there was a huge opportunity to create a social experience that would tell me what my friends like, what products they like and more importantly, what stores they like. I wanted to discover unique, independent stores I hadn’t heard of, stores that are not in the mall, basically.”
So, Ms. Varshavskaya scraped together her savings and began hiring engineers to help build her vision. “I could have considered buying a house or something like that, but that never entered my mind,” she said. “I was so interested in getting this thing off the ground.”
It took two years of tinkering before Wanelo started seeing significant traffic. In 2011, Ms. Varshavskaya decided to close her design agency and focus on Wanelo full time. She relocated to San Francisco to be closer to the tech action, in spite of the city’s ambivalence toward fashion.
“I’ve never felt like I belonged more in any city or any community than I do here,” Ms. Varshavskaya said the other day, perched on a patchwork couch in the company’s South of Market headquarters. “I love the fact that this community is full of people who don’t only have big dreams and ideas, they’re also building them.”
While she meshes with the San Francisco tech mind-set, Ms. Varshavskaya and her fashion-forward looks stand out on the Patagonia-dominated streets. When she wears leggings printed with images of Ryan Gosling, people stop and take pictures. (She recently posted a photo on Instagram of a man hugging her leg with the caption, “This is what happens when I wear Ryan Gosling.”)
The tech community has warmed up to her. Ann Miura-Ko, a founding partner of the venture capital fund Floodgate, turned down Ms. Varshavskaya the first time she asked for money.
“I felt like it was Pinterest but you could buy stuff,” Ms. Miura-Ko said. “But the second time, it was completely different. The fact that she was enabling a following of people, stores and brands reminded me a lot of Twitter,” which Floodgate had funded. “It felt like she was doing for products what Twitter had done for information.”
Ultimately, this is Ms. Varshavskaya’s goal: to democratize shopping so that a boutique in Bushwick, Brooklyn, can get as much traffic as Banana Republic, and a pashmina enthusiast in Nebraska can order a shawl from Nepal. She knows it is a lofty proposition.
“I’m kind of paranoid about wasting my time, so I really don’t want to work on things that have temporary impact,” she said. “My hope for Wanelo is that this is the company I’m building for the rest of my life.”
Comments are closed.