8. Lyst
For bringing a tailored approach to the world of fashion commerce
Lyst and co-founder Chris Morton are revolutionising the world of online fashion. Lyst is a platform that curates the biggest and best designers and fashion stores from around the world in just one place, whilst creating a personalised shopping experience for each and every user.
40% of Lyst staff are data scientists and engineers, analysing and crunching terabytes of fashion data in order to create better and more personalised customer experiences for users. But as well as being extremely data orientated they’ve demonstrated an abundance of classic challenger thinking.
Lyst have looked outside of their own industry for fresh ideas, borrowing more from the behaviours of tech brands than from ASOS or Net-a-Porter. One source of inspiration for Lyst was how users of Twitter would have the ability to customise their news feeds, another was how Spotify would tailor recommended playlists according to preferences – ideas from tech that Lyst have successfully applied to the world of fashion commerce.
Co-founder Chris Morton also speaks about the category in a refreshing way for a commerce platform, where perhaps historically the big established commerce players such as Amazon have been accused of being faceless and uninspiring.
“We’re in the entertainment business, part of making the best shopping experience for a customer is one that’s engaging and entertaining as well as useful”
- Chris Morton, Co-founder and CEO.
Redefining a category like this is a great way to benchmark yourself against outside competitors and can provide brands with a new perspective to think about their offer. Lyst realise they’re not just competing with fashion retailers for that moment of product desire but also for those ‘bored moments’ on people’s screens. Lyst are firm believer in a content strategy that partners with other fashion brands and will help them tell stories and provide enough engagement to compete with other attention-span grabbers such as twitter, email or Candy Crush.
This challenger, first launched in 2010, can already lay claim to 3 million users a month and Chris Morton has ambitious plans to grow to around 20 million within the next five years.
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