PERSONAL STYLE | The Launching of WIWT.com

One of the newest outfit-sharing communities is WIWT.com, the brain-child of Poppy Dinsey and the software design team at Caffeinehit. The recent history of this project from concept to launch ...

Poppy's story of What I Wore Today:

On the 1st of January 2010 I started a daily photo blog on Posterous called What I Wore Today. It was simple enough, just a photo each day of whatever I happened to be wearing. 

I completed the entire year without missing a post and ended up becoming Vodafone VIP’s official blogger for London Fashion Week and becoming an MSN Life & Style contributor. 

I could have stopped at the end of 2010, I’d completed the New Year’s resolution, but I decided to carry on. 

There are some exciting plans for this site later in the year, but I’m not going to say more than that now. I know, I know…fabulously uncool. I’VE GOT A SECRET NER NER NER NER. Etc. 

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The project as seen from Caffeinehit

We've known Poppy for a long time and spoken about how to take WIWT to the next level for what seemed like ages. So, at the start of 2011 we finally got round to getting stuck into the designing and developing the website and iPhone app.

iPhone app

This has to be one of the biggest projects we've worked on to date. Designing and building both the front and backend of what (is going to be) one of the biggest fashion based social networks around. 

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The official press release for the launch:

LONDON 12th September 2011: This week sees the launch of a new social network – WIWT (that’s web-speak for ‘What I Wore Today’). This new site, supported by a free iPhone app, will launch on Thursday the 15th of September 2011 – just in time for the start of London Fashion Week. WIWT will allow anyone to upload photos of their outfits and share them with the world. Users are encouraged to tag the garments they wear in their photos, then other users can click through from these tags to buy the garments from the relevant retailers.

The site has been founded by 24 year old fashion blogger Poppy Dinsey. Poppy started a daily outfit blog as a New Year’s Resolution on January 1st 2010 and 18 months later Poppy was still uploading a different outfit each day and the blog was getting 250,000 visitors per month: “I started the blog as a bit of a personal challenge to make me wear more of the clothes I already owned, but within a few weeks of my first post I was being sent pictures of other people’s outfits and they were asking to be featured on the site. It wouldn’t have made sense to have the odd guest post, but I quickly realised there was a demand for other people to be able to join in the fun.  The idea for the social network was born and now it’s finally ready to show the world.”

Poppy teamed up with Shoreditch design agency Caffeinehit to build the site and iPhone app ... [more]

The business model? Whilst the site and app are completely free to use, WIWT will make money though affiliate links, highly targeted display advertising, brand partnerships and site takeovers.

Poppy concludes: “The feedback from both our beta testers and the big British high street brands that we’ve been working closely with has been overwhelmingly positive. It seems that there is a gap in the market for a site like this - real people uploading real outfits. Everyone loves to people watch in the street but you don’t always have the confidence to ask strangers “where did you get that?” -  I really think that WIWT can change the way we shop online and look for style inspiration.”

The Big Launch as seen from whatpoppywore.com

This site is now just an archive, there will be no more updates here – ever!
Thank you so much for all the support, some of you have been around since the very first day and some of you have only just discovered the blog…but it’s been a blast.
The good news? The fun is only just getting started! I am now blogging my daily outfits here. And you can post your daily outfits too :)
Please support my new site! And please download the app.

whatpoppywore.com