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"Online fashion styling community Polyvore today released an experimental analytics dashboard designed to help brands keep track of how their goods are performing on the site over time, revealing what's popular with consumers before said goods even hit the stores.\nFor those unfamiliar, Polyvore is a three-year-old online community where more than 2 million registered users create sets using product shots of clothing and accessories. These are often accompanied by other elements that help express a certain theme or lifestyle, such as iPhones, Starbucks coffee cups, and book and movie covers.\n\n\n\n\nAlthough 2 million registered users may not seem like much, the site attracts more than 7 million unique visitors and 140 million page views per month, making it one of the largest fashion destinations on the web. One million fashion sets are created each month.\nThe dashboard enables designers  \u2014 and anyone else \u2014 to see what other brands their items are often styled with. They can also see how individual products are performing day to day (and season to season) based upon how frequently they are used in fashion collages (sets), \"liked\" and bookmarked for future reference. Brands will be given an overall rank reflecting these criteria.\nThis kind of data was previously only available to companies that ran contests on the site, in which users were encouraged to explore and interact with a set of products for a chance at various prizes, such as trips and shopping sprees. Brands were then able to use that data to predict what items would sell best.\nThis spring, for instance, Diane von Furstenberg ran a styling contest in which a certain wedge shoe that proved to be overwhelmingly popular on Polyvore went on to become a bestseller in stores. Co-founder and Head of Product Management Jess Lee claims that given the shoe's success in the Polyvore campaign, Furstenberg decided to order more inventory, which proved to be a profitable decision. Now, all brands have access to that kind of valuable data, enabling them to make similar decisions.\nThe dashboard should also offer brands ideas for new items to create. For instance, if users frequently style a given designer's tees and jeans with leather jackets from another brand, said designer might consider including leather jackets in future collections.\nPolyvore plans to make more of its data available in future iterations, helping brands and merchandisers track the rise and fall of certain trends, and other tools to help predict what items will sell best in stores.\n\u201CWith the rise of social media, there\u2019s an enormous amount of customer feedbackfor companies to digest,\u201D Lee says. \u201COur goal is to provide brands, large and small, with a simple tool that can help them make decisions about merchandising and marketing.\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/12/22/polyvore-analytics-dashboard/>