She started her career as a management consultant, but Aubrie Pagano says she always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. And she was particularly energized by fashion.

So Pagano spent her free hours assisting local Boston designer Emily Muller in launching her collection, in exchange for the opportunity to get some firsthand experience in the independent fashion design space. There she discovered that designers face a particular challenge—one that would eventually inspire Pagano to create the e-commerce startup Zoora.

“Its hard for independent designers to scale because there’s a discovery issue,” says Pagano. “[Muller] has a great website buts nobody goes to it.”

And as a shopper, Pagano says she’s felt like she’s had to settle for a piece of clothing that just isn’t quite right. Women like her are the perfect customer base for independent designers, she says.

“Something that a lot of people don’t know about independent designers is that they’re really flexible,” Pagano says.

Just last Monday, Pagano opened the Zoora website to the public, to offer women clothing that they can customize to best fit their measurements and taste. Her hope is that the women who feel underserved by traditional retail will bring independent designers the traffic—and business—they so desperately need.

Zoora joins a booming cluster of Boston companies in the space of mass customization, where e-commerce platforms allow shoppers to select and tailor products to better fit their preferences. As my colleague Greg has pointed out previously, these companies offer shoppers personalized jewelry (Gemvara), bags (F. Rock), girls clothing (FashionPlaytes), men’s dress shirts (Boston’s Blank Label and Proper Cloth in New York), and even bras (Zyrra).

Pagano started working on Zoora (a name inspired by “misura,” the Italian word for measurement) last spring, and made hiring a head buyer her first move. Since then, the company has enlisted about a dozen designers (including Muller) to sell garments on the site with options for customization. Another designer is Althea Harper, a former contestant on the Lifetime show Project Runway. (Worth noting, New York fashion tech startup Send the Trend has Project Runway veteran and winner Christian Siriano on staff.)

The customizations to Zoora garments fall into two baskets, says Pagano: “made-to-measure adjustments” and “ready-to-wear tweaks.” With the first category, customers input their specific measurements, which designers take into account to create a garment that’s a perfect fit. With “ready-to-wear tweaks,” meanwhile, garments come in standard sizes, but offer different options for elements like fabric, necklines, sleeves, and hem length.

The Zoora team now consists of … Next Page »

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At Xconomy’s event yesterday, New York’s Venture Emergence, members of Gilt Groupe’s founding team fascinated a standing-room-only audience with the tale of how, in just four years, they grew from a scrappy startup to one of the most successful e-commerce sites on the Web. Co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, who is one of our Xconomists, and Alexis Maybank insisted that one of the keys to their success is their close friendship. “Without our very strong relationship, we could have never gotten this business launched so fast,” Wilkis Wilson told the crowd.

But wait, doesn’t that advice run counter to what just about what every business expert says? One should never work with family or friends, right? Wrong, say the Gilt Girls. In fact, they’re so confident in the mixing of friends and business that they co-wrote a book about their entrepreneurship experience, By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop, which will be released in April.

The book’s title is partly a reference to Gilt’s business model: It sells fashions, home décor, and travel services in limited-time “flash sales” to people who are invited to be members on the site. But it’s also an apt description of how the co-founders have managed the business from day one—with a strong focus on making sure they have the right people in place to manage a high-growth startup.

Wilkis Wilson and Maybank have been together through both good times and bad. The good: They’ve raised about $218 million in venture capital and are widely expected to pull off a successful IPO later this year or early next year. The bad: Gilt confirmed last week it was laying off 90 people and embarking on a restructuring.

In a chat with Xconomy after their panel presentation, Maybank and Wilkis Wilson downplayed the bad times. “We scaled this business so quickly from zero employees to 900,” Maybank said. “Internal restructuring is part of the normal process in a fast-growing business.” As for how their friendship has helped them endure the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, Wilkis Wilson said … Next Page »

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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New York’s Wantworthy, an online fashion wish list, raised some $860,000 according to a regulatory filing. The company wants to raise about $1 million in total for the round. Wantworthy was among the graduates of the New York TechStars summer 2011 accelerator program.

Wantworthy, founded in 2010, developed a platform that lets users create lists of products they see online but may not be ready to purchase immediately. Users can share these lists with friends for feedback and return at their leisure to the original websites to buy the items. Wantworthy did not immediately disclose who participated in the funding round or how the proceeds will be used.

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Three-year-old Style for Hire in Brooklyn raised more than $1 million in a Series A round led by Golden Seeds in New York according to a press release issued Monday. Co-founded by Stacy London, co-host of television show What Not to Wear on TLC, Style for Hire is a network of trained and certified personal stylists who are available for in-home consultation across country. Users of Style for Hire’s website can search for local stylists to help them with fashion choices and purchases. Founded in 2008, Style for Hire launched its service in beta in September 2010.

Cindy McLaughlin, co-founder and former CEO of apparel line Abaeté, is CEO and co-founder of Style for Hire. According to the press release, Style for Hire plans to use the new funding to further the national launch of its service and expand its roster of stylists, clients, and partners.

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The fashion, advertising, and finance sectors are teeming with startups, but it takes more than a catchy gimmick to impress Laura Sachar, general partner with StarVest Partners in New York. She says her venture capital firm this year has made new investments across the country in prosaic but solid companies such as Seattle’s Lucid Commerce, a television media agency; NewComLink, an Austin, TX-based provider of retail credit services; and Xignite, a financial market data cloud provider in San Mateo, CA, with offices in New York. (A new investment is also in the works, Sachar says, but it’s too early to discuss details.) StarVest Partners has invested $30 million so far this year, and its follow-on investments include fast-growing fashion flash sales website ideeli in New York, which raised $41 million in a Series C round in April.

In a recent interview with Xconomy, Sachar said StarVest focuses on proven management teams in need of expansion capital, and that it makes a point of seeking out companies that can benefit from the firm’s network of relationships in New York.

Xconomy: How does your experience with New York’s industries relate to the country as a whole?

Laura Sachar: The companies we are talking about can be attractive and build customers throughout the U.S., but they really leverage something unique that New York brings. That’s why we have a robust investment community and that’s why so many companies are being … Next Page »

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We caught a fresh wave of tech startup financings, from companies working on improving e-mail, shopping, wellness, video surveillance, and enterprise computing. Here’s a quick rundown:

—Boston-based HelpScout, developers of software for managing group collaboration across a single e-mail address, announced the closing of its $435,000 equity round. The TechStars Boston graduate told me when we spoke this summer that it was in the process of closing a seed round, with funding from angels such as David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Joe Caruso, Chris Sheehan, and Brian Balfour.

—Ginger.io, another TechStars Boston alum, has amended an SEC filing to indicate it has raised $1.65 million of a targeted $1.7 million equity round, from 12 investors. The Cambridge, MA-based health and wellness tech company, which filed its regulatory papers under the company name Gingerd, presented in the startup Xpo at our XSITE conference in June.

—Boston-based fashion tech startup Snapette, a grad of the Mountain View, CA-based 500 Startups accelerator program, nabbed $1.1 million of a $1.275 million debt-based funding round, an SEC filing shows. Snapette, whose founder said last month that she had dropped out of Harvard’s MBA program to focus on the company, offers technology for enabling shoppers to share accessories available at local stores and for merchants to offer discounts.

—RemoteReality, a Westborough, MA-based developer of wide angle video camera systems for surveillance and navigation, has brought in $2 million of a potential $3.5 million equity-based financing round, coming from five investors, an SEC filing shows. The company’s website lists its previous investors as Chart Venture Partners and Connecticut Innovations.

—And Westborough-based Aternity, a maker of software for enterprise desktop monitoring, announced it had bagged $13 million in a Series D round led by Investor Growth Capital. The deal also included all of Aternity’s existing investors, Vertex Venture Capital, Genesis Partners, Intel Capital, and Clal Industries and Investments.

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The dynamics of shopping, especially for fashion, may never be the same again with growth of websites such as New York’s ideeli, which offers limited time “flash sales.” The five-year-old company carries the clout of venture backing that lets it strut through the industry with the confidence of a runway model. “Flash sales are part of a major disruption happening in retail,” says Paul Hurley, CEO and co-founder of ideeli.

Much like photographers maneuvering for position along the runway, investors have stepped up to capture pieces of ideeli. Founded in 2006, ideeli offers daily flash sales to its members for luxury apparel, accessories and other wares and competes with the likes of Gilt Groupe. Ideeli has gained momentum with investors as it has grown. The company raised $3.8 million in 2007 in a round with Kodiak Venture Partners and angel investors and then another $20 million in 2009 with investors that included StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital, and Kodiak. And in April it raised $41 million in a round led by Next World Capital with participation from Cue Ball Capital and prior investors.

The early financial backing, Hurley says, ran counter to perceptions during the mid-2000s when few saw room for new players in the e-tailing space. “In 2006 and into 2007, when we started to talk to investors at that point there had been virtually no investment in e-commerce,” he says. “It was felt that Amazon had won the war.

Hurley says though investors were initially skeptical of … Next Page »

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New York’s Go Try It On, the developer of a mobile app that lets users ask for opinions on their fashion choices, says in a press release it raised $3 million in a series A round. Investors include Len Blavatnik, Alex Zubillaga, and Index Ventures. Zubillaga and Index Ventures’s Danny Rimmer will join Go Try It On’s board in conjunction with the new funding. Users of the app upload photos of themselves for comments from others on their appearance. In addition to feedback from other users, the app includes advice on Fridays and Saturdays provided by stylists from cosmetics seller Sephora and apparel retailer The Gap. Go Try It On says its new funding will go toward developing its platform and leveraging data to offer users recommendations on their wardrobe choices.

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New York’s JOOR, an online fashion wholesale marketplace, raised $2.25 million in a funding round led by Battery Ventures, according to a press release. Other investors in the round include Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures, as well as individual investors William M. Smith and Richard Mishaan. One-year-old JOOR says it will use the funds for international expansion and to grow its online network of brands, buyers, and more than 7,500 independent boutiques. JOOR lets boutiques that join its network search for and order women’s fashion from more than 250 brands.

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New York-based FashionStake, which aims to engage shoppers in picking the best new designers, has acquired Palo Alto-based e-tailer Moxsie, according to a press release sent to Xconomy by FashionStake CEO Daniel Gulati. The financial terms were not disclosed. Moxsie, which specializes in carrying fashions by independent designers, has 170,000 Twitter followers and was named one of Internet Retailer‘s Top 100 retailers of 2011.

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Moda Operandi, a New York-based online luxury apparel retailer, said Monday it raised $10 million in series B financing in a round led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Previous investor New Atlantic Ventures also invested in the round. Moda Operandi users can pre-order apparel from designers such as Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang, and Missoni immediately after runway fashion shows. The company, which launched in February, said the new funding will support its growth and expansion.

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Divya Gugnani grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and told herself she’d never do that.

Now, she’s CEO of two startups. One of which, she says, is out to transform the way women shop. That would be Send The Trend, a website that sells personalized accessories like jewelry and scarves. It’s one of the many New York fashion-focused sites that has started up in the last couple of years.

Gugnani, who early on developed a passion for cooking, pursued a traditional career in finance after graduating from Cornell, taking positions at Goldman Sachs, and private equity and VC firms Investcorp International and iFormation. Those exposed her to the creative side of startups.

“I really got to see how people started a business: how they grow it, how they start it, the problems they have,” she says. “I really got to get a feel for business, but the end of the day you haven’t done it. As much as I loved being a venture capitalist, there was just this bug in my body that wants to be on the other side.”

It took her a few years, though. She went to Harvard Business School, mainly because “working in finance for four years is enough to kill someone,” she says. She ended up cooking a lot and making new friends, but when she was done, jumped right back into venture capital.

While working at FirstMark Capital, Gugnani had the idea to turn her passion for cooking into a social website for tips on recipes, nutrition and mixology. A colleague encouraged her to pursue it as a fun side project in 2008, and months later Gugnani quit her career in VC to run the site, Behind the Burner, full time.

Living the scrappy startup life exposed Gugnani to the challenges most women face while shopping, she says. “From that experience my life as a woman changed dramatically. It used to be that a great sales rep would say, ‘this is what you need to wear.’ Shopping was an activity where you got so much service and customization. Once you don’t take a salary, shopping sucks.”

“Women have a hard time shopping, whether it’s online or not online, they can’t discover the things they want to buy,” Gugnani says. “Discovery is the biggest problem.

So last year Gugnani launched Send the Trend with friend Mariah Chase, who had worked with Project Runway winner Christian Siriano. The trio developed a website that surveys women on their style preferences and brings them … Next Page »

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It’s not often I get a chance to chat about men’s fashion in a public forum. Well, it ain’t gonna happen this time either. That’s because I know next to nothing about fashion (just ask my colleagues)—but I do know something about the technology industry, and the fascinating stories of the people behind today’s leading companies.

At XSITE 2011, our flagship conference at Babson College on Thursday, June 16, I’ll be sharing the stage with one such leader, who also happens to be one of the nation’s premier fashionistas (not a word to be used lightly.) She is Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder and chief merchandising officer of New York-based Gilt Groupe, the online fashion retailer. We will be having an “entrepreneur chat” in the morning session of the event.

Gilt Groupe, founded in 2007, has risen to prominence as a top e-retailer in the field of private “flash sales”—members-only discounts on luxury handbags, shoes, and other designer apparel. The company now has more than 700 employees and is said to be valued at around $1 billion. Last month, the company filed paperwork for a $138 million financing round. Its previous investors include Matrix Partners and General Atlantic.

Wilkis Wilson is a Harvard Business School alum who cut her teeth as a merchandising exec at Louis Vuitton and Bulgari. I’ll ask her about the genesis of Gilt, the entrepreneurial lessons she has learned, and how her team plans to stand out (and keep growing) in a crowded field of fashion sites and local deals companies that includes Vente-Privee, Ideeli, HauteLook (Nordstrom), Groupon, and Boston’s own Rue La La and BuyWithMe. (There is also some speculation, as usual for a fast-growing startup, that Gilt is getting ready to go public or get acquired.)

A few other topics we might delve into (we’ll also take some audience questions):

—Challenges that Gilt has faced, including how to get big brands to sell online (let alone at a discount)

—Gilt’s unique culture and how it will evolve as the company grows (think a mix of techie “playfulness” and “fashion sexiness,” she says)

—Broader business lessons from the experiences of eBay, Amazon, Groupon, and other e-commerce firms

So please bring your questions for Alexandra Wilkis Wilson of Gilt Groupe—and we look forward to seeing you on the 16th at Babson.

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Following months of rumors, New York-based fashion site Gilt Groupe has filed to raise $138 million in a Series E offering, according to Private Equity Hub. The filing authorizes the sale of about 5 million shares at $27.68 a piece. Gilt holds online limited-time “flash sales” of deeply discounted clothing, home decor, travel, and more. The company previously raised more than $80 million in several financing rounds from investors such as Matrix Partners and General Atlantic. Its expansion plans include a full-priced men’s site, which will launch this summer.

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The proliferation of New York-based fashion websites continues: ideeli announced that it has raised a Series C funding round of $41 million. The company offers members-only, limited-time “flash” sales of clothing and other goods, making it a direct competitor of the better-known Gilt Groupe. The funding round was led by Next World Capital, with participation from Cue Ball Capital, StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital, and Kodiak Venture Partners.

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The founders of fashion e-tailer Gilt Groupe, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank, are quite aware that they have competitors popping up on the Web all the time. (Last week, Xconomy New York identified seven other fashion-related Web startups in New York City alone.) But the inventors of the fast-growing Gilt believe they can stay a step ahead of all those rivals. “What we’re good at is constant innovation,” says Wilkis Wilson. “We’re never happy with the status quo.”

Towards that end, Gilt is feverishly working towards a late-summer launch of a yet-to-be named extension of Gilt Man, its division that offers discounted clothing and gear, as well as online content, for men. The new site will sell full-priced men’s clothing— a huge departure for the New York-based company, which since its launch in 2007, has focused primarily on “flash sales,” limited-time events during which discounted fashions and home décor are offered to members only.

That niche has been plenty to make Gilt one of the hottest startups in NYC. Maybank says the company’s 2010 revenues came in at $240 million and are projected to roughly double this year. The company has raised $80 million in several financing rounds from an A-list group of investors that includes Matrix Partners and General Atlantic. Business Insider, which was also started by Gilt’s founder, Kevin Ryan, reported in February citing unnamed sources that Gilt would be raising another $80 to $100 million at a valuation of about $1 billion.

And the financial community in New York is salivating over the prospect of Gilt going public. No one over at Gilt’s smart-looking Park Avenue offices seems to be in much of a hurry to join the Wall Street crowd, though. Gilt board member Nick Beim, who is a partner with Matrix, says he thinks an initial public offering would be do-able, but that the company’s investors “are not in a rush to seek an exit. We see Gilt as a rare opportunity to build a great Internet company with a global reach.”

Maybank and Wilkis Wilson also declined to talk about the company’s funding. During a recent meeting at Gilt, they preferred to steer the conversation towards all the new initiatives the company is launching to build on its cachet. Topping that list is the upcoming full-priced men’s site.

Maybank says the company’s growing presence in the men’s market came from demand. She and Wilkis Wilson, who are both graduates of Harvard Business School, were originally inspired to start Gilt because of their own obsession with the sample sales they frequented in NYC. But they were surprised by how many men were attracted to Gilt. “Men were constantly writing us and asking ‘when are you going to sell something for us?’” Maybank says. So the company started holding flash sales for men in 2008. Today, nearly 25% of Gilt’s members are male.

The men’s sales were so popular that Gilt’s management team decided to branch into a full-priced offering. Everything on the new site will be hand selected, Maybank says. The focus will be on offering fashion, but not extremely overpriced “high fashion,” she explains. “Because we have an addicted male customer, we think he will cross over, and not be averse to paying full price,” she says.

Heading up the effort is John Auerbach, a longtime Gilt employee who helped launch Gilt Man after working in investment banking as a retail specialist. As a full-priced site, Gilt’s new offering will be competing against the online sites of Jos A. Bank, Barneys, and just about every big department store. But Auerbach isn’t worried. “In reality, most online outlets … Next Page »

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New York has long been synonymous with Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the Garment District, flagship markets for the city’s economic lifeblood that attracts an endless and competitive pool of talent to fuel its growth. When it comes to technology and innovation on the other hand, most entrepreneurs and startup companies have historically turned their sights north and west – to Boston and Silicon Valley. New York is rapidly joining these ranks, enjoying a good amount of buzz as a new hotbed for entrepreneurism. How this came to be is an interesting exercise in the tipping point that combines the right people, ecosystem and economy for innovation to thrive.

In 2010, venture capitalists invested nearly $22 billion in new companies in the United States, according to the National Venture Capital Association. As expected, the largest share of that money—$8.5 billion—was poured into 961 deals in Silicon Valley. New England followed with 387 deals that took $2.5 billion. No. 3 on the list? New York, with nearly $1.9 billion in venture money invested in 350 deals.

How did this well of innovation spring up in New York? The elements have always been there, but they have needed the right climate to thrive and time to develop. A first glimmer came during the Internet boom in the late 1990s, when many people left their traditional careers to start companies with the hopes of reaping the financial benefits of the Internet craze. These entrepreneurs primarily came from typical New York businesses such as investment banking and consulting, as well as from business schools.

But these startups faced a major hurdle that did not exist in the Northeast and Silicon Valley. The talent pool necessary to make a startup succeed did not exist in New York—yet. New York’s wealth and success had come from traditional sectors, investment banking, media and advertising, where cash compensation was the standard. Employees were not accustomed to the notion of accepting stock options, and importantly, they had not seen their friends and neighbors reaping this kind of success from startups yet. Those with engineering backgrounds were hard to come by, and companies had a hard time relocating people who had the required backgrounds from the innovation hubs.

When the bubble burst, lots of startup companies were left hanging without the resources to secure the requisite follow-on capital to stay afloat during the tough years that followed. Many simply abandoned the notion of building a startup and returned to their original fields. There is a joke in New York about that time period: “B2B” meant “back to banking” and “B2C” meant “back to consulting.”

However, there were those who had the entrepreneurial DNA and stuck around. These entrepreneurs have been smart enough and resourceful enough to rebuild their success stories of the 1990s or pursue their next startup idea. Fast forward to now, and these are the people, along with many … Next Page »

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On Monday, I wrote about three new websites that are part of a plethora of online fashion-based startups in New York City. A Forrester analyst described the phenomenon using the dreaded “B” word: “bubble.”

Here’s a list of all the companies I’ve found in NYC. Let me know if I missed any, and if you think this is a trend with staying power.

Gilt Groupe
This pioneer of online flash sales—limited-time offers of coveted clothing, home-décor items, and more—is projecting revenues of at least $400 million this year.

WingTipIt
Browse your favorite e-tailers, build a virtual closet on this site, and get feedback on your picks via Facebook and Twitter.

Send the Trend
This accessories retailer raised $2.5 million and nabbed Christian Siriano, a previous winner of the television show Project Runway, as its chief curator.

FashionStake
Founded by two freshly minted Harvard MBAs, this site lets consumers vote on their favorite new designers.

Fashism
This social-shopping site snapped up funding last year from A Grade Investments, a fund created by actor Ashton Kutcher.

Exclusively.In
Same idea as Gilt, but focused on Indian clothing, jewelry, and travel—and backed by a fresh funding round of $2.8 million.

Proper Cloth
This startup, which operates out of Polaris’ Dogpatch Labs incubator, enables men to order custom fit dress shirts online.

Birchbox
Visit this site for makeup tips, and to sign up for a $10 monthly shipment of five or so skincare and makeup samples. The founders have raised $1.4 million so far.

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Need a little fashion advice? Click onto WingTipIt, a Web site launching this week, and assemble your own virtual closet of clothes you covet—then seek feedback from friends via Facebook. Or if accessories are more your thing, click over to Send the Trend, fill out a quick survey, and you’ll receive a list of jewels, sunglasses, and other accessories tailored to your personal style.

Perhaps you enjoy discovering new designers. No problem: At FashionStake, you can buy the latest offerings from up-and-coming designers, vote for your favorites, and compare notes with other fashionistas.

WingTipIt, Send the Trend, and FashionStake—all based in New York—are just a few of the many shopping sites that have stormed the Web in the last few months. Each has its own twist, but they all share a common goal: to make online shopping way more interactive and personal than the department stores can.

“Retailers are constantly looking for ways to connect with their customers in a meaningful way,” says WingTipIt co-founder Kimberly Skelton, who worked in real estate and marketing before attending Columbia Business School. While a student, she also spent a summer working in the e-commerce group at Tory Burch.

Carla Holtze (left) and Kimberly Skelton of WingTipIt

Skelton’s e-commerce experience infused in her a desire to solve a nagging problem: Retailers can convert browsers into customers much more effectively in bricks-and-mortar stores than they can online. “In stores, customers can speak to sales agents, they can shop with their friends. They can get validation from other people,” she says. “We wanted to bring that online.”

Register on WingTipIt, and you can add a bookmarklet to your toolbar, so when you’re shopping on a retailer’s site and you see something you might want to buy, you can add it to your virtual closet with one click of the bookmarklet.

The site is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter. So once you amass a collection of clothes, you can tweet about it, or post a link to it on Facebook, and invite your friends to comment. Or, if your birthday is coming up, you can suggest that your friends … Next Page »

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