Polyvore History

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The Company Description of Its Time

On April 5, 2018, Polyvore announced that it had been acquired by SSENSE. That sentence stands at the top of the historical record filing, and this rebuild keeps it there, because it governs everything that follows. Polyvore was a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company's virtual mood board function allowed community members to add products into a shared product index, and use them to create image collages called Sets. SSENSE is filed here as an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar luxury and streetwear retailer based in Montreal, Canada. Below that announcement, the historical record itself draws the line this page respects: Below is for historical reference. What follows, in the historical record and here, is the record of what Polyvore was, written while it was operating.

Clips, the Virtual Styling Tool and Sharing

Apparel Search found many of their tools to be interesting, the historical text says, and names three. Clips: when people shop, they clip their favorite products, and clips are like visual bookmarks. The Virtual Styling Tool: using it, people mix and match products to create sets. Sharing: people share their sets on Polyvore, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more. Each tool answers a different part of online shopping as it existed then. Clipping replaced the bookmark list with pictures, the styling tool replaced the changing room with a collage, and sharing turned a private outfit idea into a publishable page that could travel further than the site itself.

The April 2011 summary kept in historical descriptions give the scale at that moment, and it is quoted here with its date attached, as a snapshot rather than a final total. Polyvore is the leading community site for online style where users are empowered to discover their style and set trends around the world. In 2011 they indicated over 6.5 million unique visitors, and Polyvore's global community had created over 28 million fashion sets shared across the site. The company collaborated with prominent brands and retailers such as Calvin Klein, Bergdorf Goodman, Diane Von Furstenberg, Lancome, Net-a-Porter, Gap and Coach to drive product engagement, and its user-generated fashion campaigns had been judged by Lady Gaga, Kate Moss and Katy Perry, among others.

A Historical Profile, Kept on Purpose

The 2011 summary also records the company's footing at that time: headquartered in Silicon Valley, Polyvore was funded by Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. Those funding facts, the visitor counts and the partner lists all belong to the operating company the historical text describes, and none of them should be quoted without their period. The April 5, 2018 acquisition announcement at the head of this page is the last event the filing itself records, and this rebuild adds no later status of its own: Apparel Search keeps profiles like this one as history, under the same rule that preserves other closed or acquired companies' filings in this directory, because deleting them would erase the record researchers came to check.

What remains useful in the profile is the clarity of the idea. A shared product index, a collage tool, and a community trusted to style in public anticipated how much of fashion discovery would move to member-made images. The kept links below carry this page's original routes onward to Apparel Search's fashion, apparel and clothing directories, exactly as recorded. A reader who arrives looking for the operating Polyvore service should read the acquisition notice first and the historical profile second, in the order the historical record arranged them, and this page is deliberately built to make that order impossible to miss.

Fashion Company Names by Letter: Fashion Companies P

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