simulate the experience of buying high-end designer clothes that go for $200 to $500 per item at Saks, Nordstrom, or Bloomingdale’s. The app releases 16,000 fashion items a year for players to choose from. The game’s users get a free virtual $500 to start with as they “buy” clothes and accessories and put together ideal outfits for the day’s contest theme, such as “First Date,” “Black and White Ball,” or “Modern Day Snow White.”
If they run out of virtual cash, they can buy more. The exchange rate is $1 for an extra $300 of play money. “This is our main source of revenue,” Tseng says.
Women can now join “fashion houses” of up to 50 players, where they advise each other about the outfits they assemble. When a player enters a contest, she must also vote for the winner. The game displays randomly selected choices to avoid bias in favor of the voter’s online friends.
Once a player “buys” a virtual dress or handbag, it stays in her closet permanently, where it’s easy to search for. Players sometimes find themselves rummaging in their real closets for a favorite item, Tseng says.
“Then they realize they don’t have it,” Tseng says. “It’s in their Covet Fashion closet.”
The game allows women to get familiar with brand name clothing, and it boosts sales for the clothiers, says head marketing executive Blair Ethington. But Crowdstar doesn’t charge apparel makers a fee for showcasing their designs on Covet Fashion, nor does it take a cut from the online sales it sends their way.
Crowdstar is competing in a market thick with online and mobile offerings that tap into women’s love of design, including Pinterest and fashion discovery apps such as San Francisco-based HeartThis, whose co-founder Andrew Gadson also has a background in social gaming. Big clothing companies are fully aware of the potential of such interactive consumer sites to generate sales. Ralph Lauren and Kate Spade & Company are among the corporate backers of the New York Fashion Tech Lab, an accelerator program that accepted its first class of startups in 2014.
Crowdstar is using its gaming elements to entice consumers to keep coming back. Covet Fashion players not only control the elements of their virtual outfits, but also choose the coloring and hairstyles of the “models” that wear them. But, I asked Tseng, why can’t women vary the build of the models, who are invariably very tall and thin?
Tseng says the models’ silhouettes are inspired by fashion illustrations, to serve Covet Fashion’s role as a styling exercise.
But wouldn’t many players, and even some designers, want to see how their outfits would look on an average woman, or even someone short and stocky?
“We have high empathy for that,” Tseng told me. “It is something that’s very top of mind for us.” He didn’t disclose any imminent changes on that score, but he said Crowdstar will be developing new features for Covet Fashion on an ongoing basis.
“We’re continuing to iterate,” Tseng says. “We’re only 30 percent there on the product.”
