Weardrobe — Designing Fashion's First Creator Platform
Rich Tong
Introduction
In 2008 the word influencer didn't exist. Neither did creator economy. The people who would build both were already online, photographing their outfits every day and posting them to Flickr groups and MySpace — platforms that had nothing to do with fashion and no way to find anyone in it.
I co-founded Weardrobe to give them a place where they belonged.
The Weardrobe Conference Bloggers featuring Tavi Gevinson, Jessica Schroeder, Rebecca Stice, Noelle & Joelle Sadler, Katy Seibel, Christine Cameron, Lucrecia Lee, Laurel Stovall, Arabelle Sicardi, Erin Hagstrom, Keiko Lynn, Claire Geist, Krystal Bick, Amy Nelson, Brooke Kao, Audrey Leary, Kyla, Kelly Framel, Sara Neville, Greta Eagan
Building Our Community
In 2009, we brought our online community to life through the Weardrobe Conference, one of the first influencer meetups of its kind.
We invited top fashion bloggers from across the country to New York City for a weekend of panels, collaborations, and photo shoots, in partnership with Topshop, PacSun, Gilt Group, Tumblr, and the Gramercy Park Hotel.
Finding Value
When we started Weardrobe, we had no idea what success would look like. There was no grand plan for monetization or acquisition — just a belief that if we built something people loved, we’d figure it out along the way.
Our strategy was essentially curiosity: keep building, keep learning, and see where the community took us.
We didn't fully see what we'd built. The buyer did.
After the Conference, Munjal Shah — founder and CEO of Like.com, a visual shopping platform spending more than $1M a month on Google ads to own fashion search — noticed that for nearly every fashion query, "black Zara jeans" to "H&M sweater," Weardrobe was the #1 organic result, often holding multiple spots on the first page.
The engine was simple: every outfit our members posted came tagged with brands. Thousands of real people posting daily had built a living catalog of fashion — a search index no retailer could match, updating itself every day. Like.com was paying millions for clicks we were earning for free.
So they bought us. A year later, Google bought them.
15k Community Members
#1 Organic Search for Thousands of Fashion Queries
$3.2M - Acquired by Google via Like.com
Full case study at richard.vision/work/weardrobe
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Posted Sep 15, 2026
Co-founded and designed Weardrobe, the first home for street-style creators — 15k members, #1 in fashion search, acquired by Like.com (now Google).
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Timeline
Dec 31, 2008 - Dec 30, 2010
Clients
Weardrobe
