Polyvore
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
Some sections are still being researched1 / 4
Sections to complete：05
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Polyvore was a social-commerce website founded in 2007 by ex-Yahoo engineers Pasha Sadri, Guangwei Yuan and Jianing Hu, with Jess Lee joining as product lead and later CEO. Its fashion-obsessed users created and shared inspirational moodboards ('sets') of clipped-together clothing items, with links to buy them; the company earned money when users clicked through to retailers, and sold user-preference intelligence to fashion brands. By 2012 it claimed 20 million unique monthly users.
02 / Polyvore FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Polyvore did not die from a product failure but from being passed between owners who valued it less than its users did. Yahoo acquired it in 2015 for about $60 million, but after Verizon bought Yahoo and folded it into Oath, the site stagnated. In April 2018 Ssense bought Polyvore from Oath mainly for its user data and traffic, shut the site down with almost no warning, and redirected all links to its own luxury retail store.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Polyvore was founded.
- Operations ended
Polyvore ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN / AFTERMATH
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.