Apparel Retailer Website

The Apparel Search Company launched a website called Apparel Retailer, at the address www.ApparelRetailer.com. Apparel Retailer was a clothing industry search engine designed to search the internet for clothing stores - the retail end of the fashion business, from the fashion boutique on a side street to the new brand looking for its first stockists.

The Apparel Retailer website was closed in December 2013. The clothing store directory here on Apparel Search, linked at the top of this page along with the store listings by name, category and location, carries the same purpose in directory form. This page records what the search engine did while it ran.

A Search Engine for Clothing Stores

The search engine specialized in locating fashion boutiques and exciting new fashion brands from around the globe. That specialty is harder than it sounds: small boutiques are exactly the businesses general search engines surface worst, because their web presence is thin and their names are often ordinary words. A store-tuned engine gave them a fairer chance of being found.

The powerful engine on the site also allowed users to search for other fashion-relevant topics, so a visit that began with one store could widen into the brands it carried and the categories it sold. Retail discovery works that way in person - one good shop leads to the next - and the engine was built to let it happen online as well.

Google Power, Fashion Tuning

The Apparel Retailer search was powered by Google. However, portions of the search results were tweaked to add some fashion flavor and make the results a bit more accurate for viewers specifically searching for clothing stores and fashion accessory stores.

That tuning philosophy ran through the company's search-engine family - the manufacturer and wholesaler engines were built the same way - because the company's expertise was the industry's map, not search technology itself. Standing on a major engine and correcting its aim toward apparel was the fastest route to a useful tool.

Stores in Directory Form

When the site closed in December 2013, store finding on Apparel Search continued in the form the company has always maintained by hand: the clothing store directory, browsable by store name, by clothing category and by store location - the three routes linked at the top of this page.

Directory and search answer the same question differently. Search is best when you know a name; a directory is best when you know a place or a category and want to see everything that fits. Retail, with its geography of neighborhoods and shopping districts, rewards the directory habit, which is why those listings remain a core part of the guide.

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