Boutiques.com

The OTHER big news in fashion this week (apart from the Lanvin/H&M craziness) is the launch of Boutiques.com, Google’s online fashion shopping portal. Boutiques.com takes the power of Google’s search engine capabilities, and marries it with a boutique strategy which means you can shop items from a selection that a celebrity, designer or blogger has curated. If you are looking for a pair of riding boots let’s say (my latest fancy), you can search under “boots” and then “riding boots”, and many hundreds will appear on your page. So far, so normal for a shopping site… But you can then refine your search to include luxury brands only, or by a particular style like edgy, classic or boho chic, or of course by size. You can also rate the options that appear on your screen by clicking “love” or “hate”, or you can save them or share with a friend. Having played around, it’s seriously impressive, and I’ve found my perfect pair of boots within five minutes which are by Kurt Geiger, while I’ve been traipsing round Hong Kong shops for ages trying to find exactly what I’ve been imagining. And here they are below!

The second selling point, that of the celebrity-curated boutiques, is interesting because not only can you search for what a stylishly-dressed celebrity has put together (I’m “following” Olivia Palermo and Ashley Olsen) but you can also find celebs you aren’t familiar with whose style you might like by searching according to a style category. It’s a lot of fun looking around, though naturally the items are priced pretty high! I also liked the “Create your Own Boutique” option because you can complete a style analysis where you click between pictures to determine what your look is. Surprise surprise, mine’s “Romantic”, which I guess I knew at the outset!

Now that you’ve read this far, the bad news of course is that right now Boutiques.com is only available for the US in terms of shipping, but that doesn’t stop us in Hong Kong from playing around with it and getting tons of ideas! I’d definitely say that if you have some time to waste you could do far worse than waste it on this site… and come back and let us know what you think of it!