Shop-Hers.com: An Online Shopping Experience that Beats All Others

With the proliferation of fashion e-commerce sites, many consumers have difficulty discerning what differentiates one site from the next, let alone offers great product and service. And though the digital age offers more accessibility and sometimes a wider range of product, quality of product and customer satisfaction sometimes gets lots in the shuffle.

Shop-Hers.com seeks to reshape the fashion e-commerce landscape by forming community with likeminded shoppers and giving them incredible opportunities to replenish their wardrobes with merchandise from similarly minded shoppers. This unique concept was borne of Shop-Hers.com co-founder and CEO Jaclyn Shanfeld’s need to clean her overstuffed closet of merchandise.

“Shop-hers.com evolved from me wanting to purge and replenish my wardrobe and there was nothing out there that was a viable solution. There was no online site that met my needs of wanting to buy great clothes that had only been worn once or a few times. I tried Ebay, but the trust factor was not there. I also tried consignment stores but I continued getting ripped off. I remember taking in several thousand dollars of clothes to a consignment store and getting a check a few months later for only a couple hundred dollars,” explained Shanfeld.

After realizing that many women were just as frustrated without viable options, Shanfeld with some key industry advisors came up with the concept on an e-commerce shopping site where women could purchase authenticated pre-owned luxury items, as well as shop from the closets of other women with similar tastes and body proportions. “When I decided to bring this concept to fruition online, I wanted to surround myself with industry professionals who supported my vision and were experts in their perspective areas of fashion … With this team of industry professionals, one of the issues that kept popping up was the multitude of returns that goes part and parcel with online shopping. There is such a huge differential in sizes that vary from designer to designer. There is no rhyme or reason for how brands cut and construct their clothing, even within the same brand, which can vary from season to season and silhouette to silhouette. We decided that in order to create a community where online shoppers could trust the sizing, we had to find commonality from some real data, “details Shanfeld.

This quest for commonality resulted in Shanfield creating the shopping soul mate component of Shop Hers.  “On Shop Hers women can shop in each other’s closet, and we match up women who have similar tastes, style and body proportions. We are seeing interesting data of women shopping in each other’s closet and forming relationships and community,” confides Shanfeld.

When reselling and buying luxury items online, consumers are always leery of sites that purport to have authentic merchandise for top design houses. Shop Hers has found a great way to ensure that shoppers are buying accurate product. “Shop Hers created partnerships with luxury brands and they are our trusted source. So, when merchandise comes in, we go to our brand partners or they come to us and authenticate the merchandise. If an order comes in that is not authentic or is damaged, we cancel the order and send the merchandise back to the seller. Buyers are very excited to know that an order has been canceled and we are sincere about customer service,” explains Shanfeld.

And like all good sites, Shanfeld understands the importance of educating her shopper about great brands, new trends, and merchandise that might be off the radar of many consumers. “It was so important to me include luxury brands that have not had market saturation. When I think of luxury, immediately Balenciaga, Valentino, Lanvin, Balmain, and a host of others come to mind, but I also think of Jenny Kanye, Myne, Adam Lippes, Citizens of Humanity, and Kimberly Orvitz. All these brands have similar luxury price points. I am also thinking of educating the consumer who is not knowledge about Jenny Kanye or Zero + Maria Cornejo. … I didn’t want to be obsessed with just the heavy hitters because I see the value in a variety of luxury brands. And so do my shoppers. Many other sites that purport to sell luxury brands only take consumers down the same paths with the tried-and-true names. We have created a platform that takes our readers down multiple paths and fashion points of view,” extrapolates Shanfeld.

Great merchandise; providing a platform for like-minded women to shop from each other’s closets; good customer service, and educating the consumer; all done in six months since Shop-Hers.com launched. Who would ask for anything better?

I know Fashion Reverie wouldn’t.

—William S. Gooch