START-UP SPOTL A
Alison Coleman speaks to Jenny Griffiths, founder o
s business sectors go fashion and technology are poles apart, but one young entrepreneur who has a passion for both has combined them to create
Snap Fashion, an iPhone app that allows users to take pictures of items of clothing they see in shops or magazines and then tracks down the same or similar items from a range of fashion retailers.
As well as the mobile app, shoppers looking for that ‘must have’ addition to their wardrobe can upload images from their computer to the Snap Fashion website or add a Snap It button to their bookmarks bar and use it to snap clothing from any website.
Snap Fashion is the brainchild of founder and CEO Jenny Griffiths, 25, who developed the app as part of her thesis while studying computer science at the University of Bristol.
She says: “I’ve always loved fashion and clothes shopping, but finding exactly what you are looking can take a lot of time, whether that is on foot or online. The idea for Snap Fashion emerged when I thought about the way that we shop, by eye, and wondered if there was a way of searching for things using pictures instead of words or brand names. There was a gap in the search market for a fashion focused visual search engine, and I believed that Snap Fashion could fill it. I designed the app, entered a few business awards while I was at university, which I won, and realised that it could have commercial potential.”
After graduating she took a job working as a project manager for an engineering firm and continued to develop the app in her spare time, which was slowly. It was the 2011 Tech City Launchpad competition that she entered that proved to be the springboard for her business plan, and as a result helped her secure the Technology Strategy Board funding and £300,000 of private investment she needed in order to take the plunge, give up her job, and in September 2012 relocate to Tech City to launch and continue developing Snap Fashion.
“That’s when I encountered the first business and technical challenges. One issue concerning user experience emerged
28 entrepreneurcountry
right at the start. I’d spent so long developing and improving the app, but overlooked something very basic; I wasn’t communicating clearly enough to users what Snap Fashion actually does, which I quickly amended,” she explains.
Another challenge was how to monetise Snap Fashion. “I was quite passionate about not charging users or bombarding them with ads, which I felt would ruin the experience for
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