Jul 1, 2011
In the rise of online business and ecommerce, shopping online has become more and more popular among many seasoned shoppers. People can easily go online and find what they want, enter their credit card information directly into the website, like videoed, or their PayPal account, and receive their desired items within a few days or weeks. But with the advent of online shopping, people aren’t discovering as many new specialty items and trends as they would if they went to boutiques, downtown areas, or even massive malls. These trend setting niche items seem to be lost online where shopping is search driven and catered to the specific request of the shopper and browsing through stores is much less likely.
Shauna Mei noticed this trend and paralleled it with the way men shop versus women. When guys go shopping, it is because they need something, like v-necks, boxers, jeans, etc. They have a specific purpose in mind, go in and execute it. Not that guys aren’t interested in trends or developing their own personal style in what they wear and have around their house, but they just don’t go browsing through store like women do. Guys may not settle for generic versions of anything that fits and does the job, but they won’t go out and look around unless they need to. Women like to shop for shoes or jeans even if they have two dozen pair, and girls are always looking for new accessories to jazz up outfits and decor, whether they need that necklace and tablecloth or Deals for TV , you can find it.
Mei founded AHAlife to bring in this essential missing element to online shopping. They search for unique specialty items that women normally wouldn’t search for and email their list serv every day with new items. While her business model may pull largely from a women’s clothing off-line shopping model, most of AHAlife’s featured items are actually centered around food, art, design, travel and philanthropy, in addition to and before fashion items. The merchandise they feature is held at consignment and then ordered from the manufacturer based on how much they are selling at a given point in the day. This way, there’s no stocking up on items you don’t know if you’ll sell or not, but it also eliminates the marketing of a number of fashion items, which have to be pre-ordered months in advance to anticipate seasons and seasonal trends.
But one of the best aspects of AHAlife is that it encourages discussion between subscribers and re-creates online the kind of conversations that would go on in a physical retail store. And these kind of conversations are what really drive sales- the kind that make connections between customers and increase their sense of style when multiple shoppers are backing the product and discussing its qualities. Being a new start up recently founded in September 2010, we’ll have to wait and see if this new kind of online concept shopping pans out in virtual reality as much as it does in theory.
