Japanese fashion coordination site iQON surpasses 1 million users

SHARE:
iQON_logo
iQON’s new logo

See the original story in Japanese.

Vasily, a Tokyo-based startup which runs online fashion coordination service iQON, announced today that it has surpassed 1 million users. Coinciding with this announcement, the company rebranded its logo design.

Since its launch back in April 2010, the service has acquired over 1 million coordinated outfits and listed over 4 million fashion items. Each item introduced on the website is linked to other e-commerce sites where you can buy it, and they drive over 1 million times the traffic to these affiliated e-commerce sites a month. They also announced that some of these sites earn over $1 million in their monthly revenue from iQON users.

Will iQON disrupt the fashion e-commerce landscape?

Vasily CEO Yuki Kanayama
Vasily CEO
Yuki Kanayama

Over this past year, we’ve seen many startups have been competing with each others to gain as much time of smartphone users as possible with their mobile services, which is truly remarkable in the space of curated information sites for females. These sites are easy to launch because they don’t need to prepare resources but can be created through use of content from other media sites.

But I think this concept does not apply to iQON since the curated fashion site is not one where users consume content passively like other curated content sites. In response to this idea, the company’s CEO Yuki Kanayama told us their service motivates users to act impulsively upon understanding the fashion trends and buying new outfit. This perspective can be proven by the fact that some of their affiliated e-commerce sites obtain 25% of the user traffic from iQON, and others generate a monthly revenue worth over almost $1 million.

All media sites have to make money to survive. So they have to establish intimate relationships with their users and provide them with values enough so that the users are willing to pay fees. As proven by iQON with their business, we have to be more focused on metrics and results. Through its integration efforts with e-commerce sites, it will be interesting to see how iQON can bring a new concept upon generating revenue streams to curated content sites.

celebrating-1million-users-at-iqon
iQON celebrates its 1,000,000th user sign-up.