As the founder of a start up helping men dress their best, Liam Houlahan has learnt a thing or two about style. More so than that, he's learnt what it takes to adjust to the market, develop relationships and learn fast in the world of business. He explains the journey his start up has gone on and offers his advice to others planning on following suit. 

 

Can you tell us a little about Wearit and why you founded it?

Wearit is an app that enables people to get styled by crowd sourced stylists with clothes from the best online retailers.

I founded Wearit originally because of my own clothes shopping woes. I hated clothes shopping and observed that my mates were essentially being styled by their significant others. This sparked the original idea of a platform where guys could get styled by stylists who were crowd sourced!

Your business has gone through some changes recently – can you tell us about those?

We’re always changing and developing our service but most recently we’ve expanded in to the womenswear market. The original idea for Wearit was limited to menswear with guys being styled by girls. The platform now enables anyone to get styled and anyone with a knack for fashion to become a stylist.

We’re really excited about this expansion as we felt the original concept was too limiting from a market point of view. We’re hoping that this new expansion will help with our network effects as more people invite their friends to the platform to style each other.

Is it challenging to make those kind of directional changes in your business?

Yes, very challenging. Product changes generally have limited impact on the overall business but a change in market has a much bigger impact. We’re taking it slow for the meantime as we test our assumptions with this change to ensure that it’s performing as we thought it would.

From a product point of view it hasn’t been too challenging, but when it comes to the marketing and overall branding of our business, I can foresee that we’ll have to invest a whole lot more as we’ve now expanded.

What’s been the hardest part about getting Wearit into the market?

I wouldn’t say getting Wearit as a concept into the market has been very hard. With technology these days it’s easy to spin up a website for your idea and start driving traffic to it.

The hardest part about this business has been developing a service that truly resonates with the wider market. Clothes shopping and fashion is a funny one. Once you start getting in to it you realise there are a whole lot of nuances with how people shop, why they buy, when they buy and what clothes will actually suit them. There are so many moving parts that we have to co-ordinate together in order to provide the experience that the market wants.

What’s your version of success for this startup?

My version of success for this start up is solving what I mentioned above. Building a service that resonates with your market is the key to developing a business which is sustainable. In the age of the online giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, it’s tough to come along and develop something that truly captures people in a way that they’ll keep coming back. These guys are the benchmark when it comes to building digital products for consumers. It’s what they’re used to so they expect a level of service on par with these guys. The challenge is that they have billions and you don’t.

Starting a business from a young age (23) must have its challenges, but what are the positive parts of that?

Yes, it’s very challenging, especially this type of business (an online marketplace). The positives for me would be to do with the speed of learning that I’m exposed to everyday. This not only includes business and technology learnings, but more importantly the learnings about people. When you’re starting a business you have to build relationships as well as lead people towards your vision. For someone young like myself who didn’t have a huge amount of life experience this has been really awesome. I truly value every day that I get to wake up and work on my own vision!

What would you say to others looking to lead a startup?

I would say be cautious if it’s your first time starting a business. Even if there are a lot of positives at the beginning, the deeper you dig, you start to find the challenges that lurk. If you’re still working in a job I think it’s a great idea to work on your idea on the side until it has enough traction for you to take the leap.

Besides that, if you have an idea, don’t hold back on exposing it to your market. Talk to people about it and you’ll be surprised at what can come out from bouncing your ideas around the dinner table. But also, the more you expose your idea and resonates with your target market, then the more you’ll be motivated to work on it!

05 April, 2017 by Emily McLean,