Jess Lee Creates Truly Interactive Fashion Shopping

Online shoppers looking to create their own unique looks by pulling together items from an assortment of brands find their mix-and-match heaven at Jess Lee’s Polyvore.

Lee makes her profits through partnerships with e-commerce sites that fill the orders for the items shoppers configure on Polyvore and from advertising fees paid by fashion brands eager for online engagement.

Lee’s success in tapping this under-served market for youthful fashion questers is nothing short of phenomenal. As of June her 4-year-old startup was attracting 10 million users a month, five times that of Style.com, Conde Nast’s online fashion flagship.

“When I left Google four years ago, everyone told me I was crazy,” Lee told Gigaom. “Fashion and e-commerce was just not a hot space at the time.”

Polyvore provides a platform on which users can make collages by bringing together random internet photos of fashion items they want in their ensembles. From a purely technical standpoint, Lee sees the site as more akin to a game site than a fashion site.

“The thing that differentiates us is that we’re a tech company that happens to be in fashion, not a fashion company that has technology,” Lee said. ”Our focus is really on building the product. From an engineering standpoint, it’s almost like building a game. Our community is very engaged, and very addicted.” An eighth of their visitors return over 100 times a month.

Polyvore’s tech focus is evident in its staffing. Fully half of its 23 employees are engineers. Its sales force comprises only has two full-time employees despite the company’s intense focus on revenue, especially now that sites like Courturious and Looklet have joined Polyvore in vying for online fashion traffic. The newcomers are also finding looming interest from giants like Google and Zappos which recently launched Boutiques.com.

Lee is a Hong Kong native who spent four years at Google Maps before joining former Google product manager Guangwei Yuan and former Yahoo engineers Jianing Hu and Pasha Sadri in February of 2007 to create Polyvore in Mountain View, California. So far it has pulled in $8.2 million in venture funding. By early June Polyvore had started turning a profit.