Fashion site Poshmark launches personal store built around your 'Style Genome'

A personal fashion store that continually recreates itself as you make choices. Women’s fashion marketplace Poshmark is launching that vision of shopping nirvana today.

Called PoshMatch, the virtual storefront — a user’s feed of products and her “closets” — uses what the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company calls the “first social merchandising engine” to match users with the most appropriate products and designers. And there are a lot of choices — six million items for sale at any one time, from five thousand different designers.

“Based on activity, [the engine] will deduce your Style Genome,” Poshmark CEO and founder Manish Chandra told VentureBeat.

But you can have a split Genome, Chandra said. Defined by her choices, it may turn out that a woman is “both a Boho and a Preppy — and she’ll be served both Anthropologie and J.Crew.”

The site allows users to “shop closets of women across America” for used and new clothes by clothing type and brands or through “shopping parties,” which are items offered around a theme in a real-time shopping event. Or a user can sell clothes from her own closet.

But your selections might also be tilted toward opportunity, as real-time price notifications show items from your “style graph” when they go on sale.

Let’s say a shopper needs to buy shoes for a wedding. The key question, Chandra noted, is: “How do you connect a shopper to brands she covets?”

Tastes are defined by what she searches for and choices she makes from discovery or purchases. Curated searches or “showrooms” help guide the quest, and the “shopping parties” can offer the random find of, say, window shopping.

Then there are the people on Poshmark you’re following, assumedly for their style choices, and the clothes you share with your buds.

“We’re leveraging natural sharing,” Chandra told us. It occurs on the site at a rate of “10 to 12 shares per second, and more than a million shares a day.”

Of course, lots of other sites offer personalization based on choices, but Chandra sees Poshmark presenting a unique combination.

The site, he said, is now providing the kind of curation that, say, Pinterest does, where you can click through images to shop. Plus it has the shopping experience of pure retail sites like Shopbop or Zappos and the selling experience of an eBay or Craigslist.

“We’re giving you a beautiful integrated platform that integrates all three,” he said.

Since its founding in early 2011, Poshmark has rounded up $15.5 million in two rounds, and its angel investors include actor Ashton Kutcher and fashion stylist Rachel Zoe.

PoshMatch is now out in the latest iOS app version of the site, and it will be available in upcoming upgrades for the Android app and the website.