Fashion Sites The New Craze For Online Purchases?

Trendy fashion sites are nothing new, but what might be is the trend in online purchases from those cool fashionable websites.

This fashion website called ‘Nasty Girl‘ has gone from $28 million in revenue from last year, 2011 to a cool $128 million on track for this year 2012. This kind of growth is quickly attracting investments from venture capitalists. They just secured $40 million in Series B funding and they plan to grow steadily as Forbes has called them out at a staggering 10,000%.  Nasty girl isn’t the only one cleaning up in VC fund raising, other niche’ fashion websites are doing well. Just Fab raised $76 million in funding.

I’ve noticed an uptick in niche’ fashion websites and their marketing strategies towards their target demographics. They are using edgier tactics along with exclusive offerings through their email marketing blasts which aren’t present visually from their public facing website. I have been using Jackthreads for quite sometime and I am always impressed with their ability to entice my to click through ads in their email blast to their website.

It seems there is a trend with these websites in sales growth. Go Global. Nasty Girl is now selling 35% of it’s product outside the United States and Zolando, the samwer Zappos clone has also opened it’s doors to a global audience with some investment help from JP Morgan and Quadrant Capital. There is also a website that mimics Jack Threads almost to a tee but is aimed towards the outdoorsman, sport shooter, archer, camper etc. It’s called Dvor.

If you do a Google Search for Dvor it yields this:

The idea that there is an exclusive membership makes a shopper feel they are missing out on some incredible deal and they must be a part of this secret society of shoppers for the hipster elites. It worked on me, I had to relinquish my email address, as this is how these types of websites attract daily traffic from their members. The private shopping experience is open to all. Invitation only? Well, sure, give them your e-mail address and you will be invited. This is nothing new, there are dozens of websites world wide that have been doing this for a long time, but it’s still working in more ways than one. The growth of these niche’ websites is rapant in an economy which for the most part has been fairly flat. Looking to start an online business? You may want to consider a niche fashion site with an exclusive membership that’s “invite only”.