Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
It’s always been a tricky process to find the perfect dress. The women’s formal wear industry has been decentralized and offline for decades, fragmented across mom-and-pop boutique shops, with sparse inventory available online and within department stores. In other words, finding the perfect wedding gown or prom dress meant driving for hours to different stores hoping these stores carry your size or the style you want. This is especially frustrating when that special occasion you are shopping for means so much to you. Similarly, it’s been tough to resell these items after that special occasion is over, as buyers on generic marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to not focus on giving a safe and easy shopping experience for this type of inventory. Moreover, it takes a lot longer to sell dresses on these platforms since the buyers there have much lower intent on purchasing this kind of inventory.
Queenly attempts to solve that two-sided problem. We’ve launched a web, iOS, and (pared-down) Android app for consumers to upload their dresses that they no longer have a user for and for small business owners to bulk upload their dress inventory to help them generate more revenue.
We’re solving this problem because of our personal backgrounds: Trisha and I are two minority immigrant founders from low income families. For us, having that transformative Cinderella dress was tremendously meaningful but never truly attainable. My cofounder, an emancipated youth, found her Cinderella opportunity through joining pageants during college. For her and many young women, these pageants had not only helped her personal growth, but also helped her pay tuition and survive. This experience gave us both a strong pillar of support and got her through tough times, and so we dedicated ourselves to the mission of providing affordability and access to dresses for young women. Through forging friendships with other girls we met during pageants, and working with formalwear fashion designers, we found solace in a diverse community of those trying to push the boundaries of what it means to feel beautiful and confident in the modern age, that such traits can come in all shapes and sizes, and embracing them wholeheartedly.
From this experience, we understand that search precision for one’s body type, skin tone, height, and budget in this market is not a secondary concern but rather a first-order necessity. The 50k+ dresses uploaded onto Queenly are indexed by color, fabric, dress size, hemline, neckline, silhouette and sleeve length. In beta testing now is searching by skin tone, filtering by height, and computer vision image search.
If you’ve experienced this frustration buying or selling formal dresses, or know someone who has, we would love to hear your feedback. We’re very excited to be sharing this with HN, and we’ll be here to answer questions you want to throw our way!
37 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] thread> buyers on generic marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to not focus on giving a safe and easy shopping experience for this type of inventory
Can you speak towards what you do to improve the buyer / seller experience for these sorts of items?
I would try and find a way to change the experience so its not similar to buying stuff on Ebay (i.e the homepage feels that way)
Coming from an immigrant family myself, the utility of something is worth more than the perceived newness, and deal hunting is a prized skill. Queenly is a good match for demographics like that.
If I were you I would pay a professional designer to work on that.
This is the second Launch HN in the last few days (the other being that macOS meeting widget one) that has left me absolutely baffled as to what YC saw/sees in it.
second, i don't know if this is just my browser, but the images associated with step 1/2/3 (step 2 is missing) are vertically stretched kind of wrong, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/Hr63i0q.png
other than that, i strongly commend you for not using some kind of auto-hiding animation on the sticky header. and also not using animations in general. good call.
iOS - Objective C, UIKit, IGListKit web - React on next.js and native css Android - Kotlin
We both love the name, although if I'm being honest I think the brand colors and fonts could be elevated in order to more meaningfully distinguish yourself from eBay and your other non-verticalized competitors (who all seem to have kind of tech-y, too-fun brands).
Some feedback on your positioning:
1. It wasn't immediately clear whether Queenly was a marketplace, a store, or some mix of both. This matters to us because it helps set our expectations around the buying experience.
2. Since some photos were stock photos, we wondered whether a seller could send you a dirty dress (or nothing at all). We found the answer (dry cleaning!) in your FAQ. In our eyes, this is a big differentiator vs eBay or similar. Might be worth highlighting that more prominently.
In general, it looks like you have a great product that solves a real problem. I know homepage real estate is at a premium, and you probably want to highlight inventory, but it might be worth doing a little more selling in the early days to explain why you're different. On a hunch, I checked out what StockX did to thread this needle a few years ago. I think their approach is elegant: https://web.archive.org/web/20170216204356/https://stockx.co...
CCongrats and good luck!
For context on 1. We do indeed have both resale dresses as well as mom and pop dress boutiques with brand new inventory on our platform. The latter arose during the pandemic, as many of those shops unfortunately closed down and had to find a way to integrate their inventory online. It’s definitely a tricky UX challenge, to communicate the availability of both types of products on one platform. On this topic as well as the FAQ/dress cleaning subject, taking inspiration from how streetwear marketplaces is a great suggestion.
Here's a niche worth looking into: Women's attire for formal music recitals and performances. My experience is limited to being a parent of a classical music student. Every musician ends up needing a variety of outfits for performances of different kinds, and for women, a solo performance tends to demand something akin to a formal dress. Shopping for such a thing is a pain in the arse, but they'll buy one and wear it over an over if it works.
In addition to looking good, the dress has to work meaning that it can't interfere with playing an instrument or singing. Not having ever worn such a thing, I can't guess what is needed, but there are endless performance videos on YouTube of concert performers, and you can imagine that someone like Hilary Hahn has figured out what works by now.
Dresses that fit younger girls would also be a thing.
Being a male musician, I'm kind of lucky that I can get away with something that's 100% generic. I bought a used tuxedo, almost a quarter century ago, and have worn it hundreds of times. Every musician male or female, also owns a set of "concert black," which is black shirt and black pants.