In just eight years, online retailer Stitch Fix has created a flourishing business. More than 3.2 million shoppers use its service annually to buy merchandise from jeans to wool sweaters to bracelets.
This year, in honor of Marie Claire's 25th anniversary, our New Guard list is all about women who have celebrated their own milestones. The storied ambition gap? You won’t find it here. Instead, prepare yourself for a massive dose of career inspiration.
At Stitch Fix, the online personal styling service, finding the right thing to wear is as much about fashion as it is about data. The company has hired over 100 data scientists to build a robust set of algorithms that determine everything from the size, silhouette, and style of each item that shows up on a client's doorstep.
Rebecca Minkoff is a New York Fashion Week mainstay. Each season, she’s at the forefront of what the modern female shopper really wants in her closet whether it’s a faux fur coat or a snakeskin bag — or just to be seen when it comes to an inclusive size range. And her latest endeavor is rooted in that spirit of inclusivity and fashion for all. This season, the designer announced her continued partnership with online personal styling service, Stitch Fix, revealing that they’ve teamed up to launch their first-ever, size-inclusive capsule collection timed to her New York Fashion Week show.
Money cannot buy you style - or so the case used to be. Then in the early 2000s came personal stylists, who would, for a fee, help high-powered and high-profile women dress well for work and red carpet events. Celebrities once absent from magazine fashion pages started topping best-dressed lists, and the talents behind those looks - Rachel Zoe, Elizabeth Saltzman, Kate Young - became famous in their own right. But now those services are being built into luxury shopping platforms in a bid to retain the ultra-high-net-worth shoppers who keep them afloat.
Meet the women who are leading the way toward a better world. InStyle's third Badass Women issue is here! And the cherry on top is always the bi-annual Badass 50 feature which spotlights dedicated women from the spheres of science, social justice, law, entertainment, politics, and other industries.
Founder Katrina Lake says even the biggest troves of statistics lack power unless they’re analyzed. It takes guts to tell a fortysomething woman she should wear a romper—the one-piece shorts-and-shirt combination traditionally worn by small children. Still, that’s what Katrina Lake, 36, co-founder and chief executive officer of online retailer and styling service Stitch Fix Inc., did in early June when she pulled together an assortment of clothing for a customer.
The marketplace is overwhelmingly and increasingly crowded with brands and product, which is, in turn, compounding an industry-wide problem with sizing - why am I a 10 in one brand yet a 12 in another?
Many personal stylists are lovely in practice – patient, encouraging and budget-sympathetic. But as a group, they have a reputation for being high maintenance. And the expense. That’s just their fees, never mind all the “elevated” items they’ll bully you into buying. It was exactly this perception that inspired Katrina Lake, a venture capitalist more used to investing in others, to set up her own business in San Francisco in 2011. Stitch Fix is an online styling service that’s affordable and accessible to us, the Mirror-Dependents.
Katrina Lake wants to revolutionize shopping for the time-poor and over-stimulated using data and a human touch. But will her personal styling service Stitch Fix take off in the UK? Vogue meets the ground-breaking CEO of the billion-dollar fashion tech company as she touches down in London.