Polyvore’s new mobile app Remix chooses outfits for you

Polyvore founder says she really wanted to re-create Cher Horowitz’s computerized closet from Clueless with her latest app.

Called Polyvore Remix, the mobile app generates outfits based on a single item of clothing unearthed either through a basic search or through Remix’s listings of various fashion trends.

The suggested outfits are based on other articles of clothing you’ve “faved” on Polyvore’s eponymous app and Remix. Be warned: Remix won’t generate an unlimited number of outfits, but I was able to get 19 around one pair of shoes. The site boasts 150 million “shoppable looks.”

Once you stumble onto an outfit (or even just a piece of clothing within an outfit) you like, you can select it, and Remix will reveal a feed at the bottom of your screen of similar items. Scrolling below the feed will take you to your desired item with its price and the opportunity to buy or “remix” the item into another outfit.

You can text outfits to friends to get their opinion, and you can monitor both individual clothing items you’ve liked as well as whole outfits.

Though the entire shopping experience happens in-app, Remix forwards shoppers to a retailer site to complete their purchase. The checkout experience, therefore, is pretty awful. You have to purchase clothing items individually from each store, and the interface depends on how mobile-friendly the retailer website is. It’s far from seamless.

It’s that final leg that may prevent Remix from being the great shopping app it could be. This is the hardest part of any aggregated shopping platform, though others have been more successful. Competitor Keep tackles the issue by acting like a personal shopper for its users. With Keep’s OneCart feature, users can purchase all desired items through a single shopping cart. Keep makes purchases at each individual retailer site on behalf of the user and then serves as a middleman, handling all aspects of the transaction (shipping, confirmation, returns, etc.). The result is a really easy shopping experience, but the experience comes at Keep’s own expense — the company fronts the money for all its transactions.

Polyvore is wise to leverage its massive collection of user and fashion data to encourage users to buy. But in order for Polyvore to take advantage of the promise of mobile shopping, it will need to solve for the pain points in its checkout experience.