Get Wanelo If You Love Fashion
With over 300,000 stores in one app, Wanelo is an enormous shopping mall housed in a tiny app on your smartphone. You could browse clothing and home goods for days on end without combing through all of the merchandise available. New items are added all the time by users so even if you do get to the end, it’s not the end. For a true fashionista, it’s a dream come true.
Wanelo was created with love by a fellow fashionista who wants to make life easier for shopaholics, especially women who love fashion. But there are many items for men and endless home goods too.
Bottom line: get Wanelo if you love fashion. It’s not just another shopping app. It’s a social shopping app with over 11 million users sharing their favorite items while they shop.
Who Created Wanelo?
Deena Varshavskaya is a Siberian immigrant who loves fashion. She adores one-of-a-kind items and convenience. Hunting down fabulous, unique pieces for her wardrobe wasn’t convenient. It was time consuming. That’s how the idea for Wanelo was born.
She launched the app on her own back in 2009. She never expected Wanelo to become such a phenomenon and was shocked when users started showing up and enjoying the site. But the site and app have become wildly popular. Now she employs a team of over 30 people who make the Wanelo shopping experience as fun and convenient as possible.
What’s Unique About Wanelo?
Wanelo is a social shopping app. You connect with current friends and make new ones. You share your favorite clothes. And then you can buy them from the original stores or from Wanelo, either way it’s linked by the Buy button under each product. It’s meant to be crazy simple to find and buy what you want.
Owner Deena Varshavskaya says, “We’re re-organizing shopping around people.”
It’s a sort of Pinterest meets Instagram for clothes and home goods. You Save items (similar to Pinning) to your board, which your friends can see. You can also browse their boards. My favorite feature is that you can tag your friends to show them an item and they can tag you, too.
You can find products from over 300,000 brands on Wanelo and save things you find on other sites. Everyone from huge retailers like Nordstrom to tiny one-person Etsy shops show up on Wanelo. For the smaller retailers, it can be an incredible form of free advertising and a way to build relationships with customers.
Why Do I Really Need Wanelo?
The name is an abbreviation for Want, Need, Love. The whole purpose of the app is to help you find the clothes you want and need that you’ll love until they’re too worn out to wear in public.
Shopping is more fun with friends, right? Someone you can ask for a second opinion or who might find something you love that you missed is priceless.
If you love to be up on the latest trends, there’s no better place than Wanelo. You’ll see what’s trending among real people. Real shoppers who love fashion, just like you. If you go to the mall, you see primarily what big marketers want you to see. If you use Wanelo, you see what’s everyday fashionistas are buying. There’s no advertising on Wanelo.
How Do I Use Wanelo?
When you first download the app, you’ll share information about your tastes by saying whether or not you like photos of certain styles. The app will let you do this nearly endlessly, so when you feel like you’ve rated enough or your sick of rating, just stop.
Then, just start browsing and saving things you like. The more you save, the better Wanelo learns what you like and will show you things you like in the future.
You can also connect with friends. The app connects to Facebook, Twitter, and your Contacts to let you know which of your friends are already using Wanelo and you can follow them in just a few taps. Then you can see what your friends have saved and like. It might inspire you to buy something new for yourself or something for them as a gift.
If you’re looking for something specific, you can search for it. If you don’t find exactly what you like, you can sign up for notifications so you’ll know as soon as something that matches your search criteria is available on Wanelo.
It’s free to download, browse, save things, and interact with others. You only spend money if you buy clothes. So, in theory this app is totally free, but it works so well that you’ll definitely shell out a few dollars on clothes. My opinion: worth it because I find clothes that I love and will wear again and again.
To Sum Up…
Deena Varshavskaya is a genius and a fashion lover who knows how to give consumers the best online shopping experience from the convenience of phone and laptop. She believes in her platform so much that she uses and shops on it herself. In an interview on Mashable she revealed, “I find the most amazing things on Wanelo, which I would never otherwise come across. I just ordered these crazy glasses from Europe from the same store that supplies Rihanna and some other stars. People come back because it’s an incredible form of entertainment and an incredible form of self-expression.”
Even if you’re not actively shopping for something, you can have fun browsing Wanelo and seeing what’s trending. As Varshavskaya says, this app is as much a form of entertainment as it is a place to buy things. Wanelo is bringing the fun of shopping in physical stores to online shopping. Finally, discovering new trends and clothes online is actually enjoyable instead of merely convenient.
And without advertising, the things you find are truly organic search results. You won’t find that on giant retail sites.
You need to get Wanelo if you love fashion. If you don’t, you’ll soon be out of the loop.