When I first came up with the idea of Mona Lisa Style, I was afraid of telling others because I thought they would steal my idea.  I think many others feel the same way too.  I would explain my idea in sweepingly general terms and purposely be vague about features, pricing, and target market.  People would listen and feign interest, but I never got any constructive feedback or ideas.  It was when I started being more open about my idea, vision, and business model that I started getting valuable feedback from potential investors, potential customers, and people in the fashion and/or technology industry.  Remember, I started off not knowing what the difference between a programmer and designer was.  I didn't know anything about websites or how to make them.

It seems that when you open things up and ask for collaboration and feedback, as google and many computer programming languages have done, you get a higher quality of involvement and responses.  People form a community around these topics and contribute frequently during their free time, resulting in diversity of perspectives, opinions on how to improve, and awareness.  Remember how AOL Instant Messenger was the first messaging program?  Didn't you find it an inconvenience that you could only talk to your friends if they had an AIM account also?  You weren't able to talk to friends who were using Skype, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN messenger.  You had to talk to Johan on AIM, Carl on MSN, and Sarah on Skype all because each of those companies wanted to make people sign up for their specific service rather than make things convenient for their users.  But now, you can sign into AIM through your google chat account and there are services like Digsby that integrate all of your chats so you can talk to people on different networks just by signing into Digsby.  Or remember when there was no such thing as Facebook Connect?  You would have to create a new account on new websites by typing in the same information.  But now, you can click a button and you're all set to go.  Isn't it so much easier this way?

So why don't fashion companies do the same thing?  Our thinking is that  instead of each brand developing a private wholesale log-in for their buyers and spending tens of thousands of dollars doing it, they can list their styles on Mona Lisa Style.  As I mentioned in my Starts of a Startup post, I realized that each company has it's own full-time person organizing information collected in market.  Instead of doing that, why doesn't everyone just go to one centralized location to find the information?  It's also easier for buyers because instead of logging into 20 different vendor websites, they can now log into Mona Lisa Style and see all of the brands they carry.  They can even comparison shop across brands without leaving the website.  Contemporary brands are pretty young companies.  The oldest one is only about 10 years old at this point and we know times are tough.  So why not pool resources to create something that can make the entire industry more efficient?