Kaboodle revamps Web site

Kaboodle (www.kaboodle.com), the largest social shopping platform for connecting people and products, today introduced a new site experience focusing on “friend-sourced style.” As part of Kaboodle’s five-year anniversary, the company unveiled a site re-imagination with a full complement of innovative new features and a clean, chic aesthetic. An acknowledged pioneer in the space, Kaboodle continues to break ground offering the highly engaging social shopping experience to consumers.

“This is the next step towards realizing the promise of social shopping,” said Kaboodle CEO Anne Kallin Zehren. “By giving our users trusted social recommendations for products and people that are uniquely relevant to them, we’re bringing that girlfriend-to-girlfriend social shopping experience to the web. This iteration makes it easier to connect users with like-minded shoppers who will help them discover, share and buy products they love.”

Kaboodle’s re-imagination and new features put the focus squarely on enhancing the experience of both its passionate community and its large user base, averaging eight million unique visitors per month over the last year. Kaboodle represents the largest catalog of user-generated products on the Web, with members adding an average of 400,000 products each month to a catalog of nine million products.

Some of the most notable additions to Kaboodle’s coterie of innovative social shopping features and offerings include:

Style Friend Finder
The new Style Friend Finder instantly connects and involves users with other like-minded shoppers on the site. As you click on products you like, people with similar tastes to follow appear on the side of page – all in a matter of seconds. Every time the people you follow discover products, create styleboards or polls, for example, the actions appear in users’ activity feeds, just like Facebook. In essence, your “style friends” are shopping for you. “When one of your style friends adds a new pair of shoes, you’re more likely to take a serious look because you share similar style,” says Zehren. “These social recommendations are often tipping points in the purchase cycle.”

Trend-o-Meter
The Trend-o-Meter highlights what’s hot on Kaboodle in real time for fashion, style, and beauty. It is a series of ranked lists on trending products, brands, and people based on user activity on the site. “Peer-to-peer endorsements are the Holy Grail of retail sales,” said Zehren. “When a large and stylish community is helping to identify what’s ’in,’ it directly influences not only what people purchase, but also what they are recommending to their social networks.” Kaboodle has developed proprietary algorithms that identify and track trends by style-based attributes such as color, pattern, material and design, based on products people are adding to Kaboodle from around the Web. The Trend-o-Meter will soon highlight

trending people on Kaboodle - members with the most style influence on the site - and advertisers will be given the opportunity to showcase their own trending products as well.

“This iteration begins to better align our users with like-minded shoppers and then connect them with the most trending brands and products, according to our stylish community,” said Zehren. “These kinds of social recommendations, especially from influential users, carry significant weight all the way down the sales funnel and continue on after the purchase is made.”

In addition to the site relaunch, Kaboodle is hosting an anniversary celebration that features the first-ever crowdsourced runway show with looks provided by Bloomingdale’s and modeled by prominent fashion bloggers, editors, and influencers from the New York tech and media circles. The runway looks are inspired by Kaboodle styleboard contest winners, many of whom will also walk the runway.