StyleBlazer Exclusive: Meet Whisp, An Online Shopping Destination Hoping To Be The Future Of E-Commerce

Photo: Whisp

Daydreaming with your head in the clouds about the next big thing is all well and good, but sometimes the inspiration you need is right in front of your face. At least, that was the case for Moncef Zizi (below right), one of three co-founders of Whisp, a brand new online shopping platform that hopes to change the fashion conversation for the better.

Whisp is a platform dedicated to merging online shopping and fashion conversation into one seamless, private experience on both the web at Whisp.com and on the iPad. The idea for Whisp came to Zizi while he was living in Paris. His wife was a big online shopper, and he noticed some frustrations she consistently had with shopping on the web, namely having to open multiple tabs all the time, encountering dead links on sites like Pinterest (the WORST), and the lack of an effective medium to talk about her fashion choices. (After all, everyone knows that asking all 1,000 of your Facebook friends at once if you should buy a new Alexander Wang purse is kind of tacky.)

From these frustrations sprang the idea to aggregate all the great fashion content on the web into a single place built around the conversations people want to have about their fashion choices. Zizi then got together in New York City to prototype and research with the other two co-founders, Karoon Monfared (below center), a former colleague at McKinsey and Company, and Jassin Meknassi (below left), a data scientist and childhood friend from Morocco, and thus Whisp was born.

What’s unique about Whisp is how you use it, the Whisping, so to speak. The site is set up similarly to Pinterest and only features fashion content. From brands as varied as Rag & Bone to Topshop to Mary Katrantzou, you can browse items by gender, by store, by products, by brand, etc. (they even have brand profile pages with lookbooks–amaze). When you see something you like you can either save it or “Whisp” it to a friend–drag and drop it into a private chat that works both on Whisp and on Facebook–no hyperlinks necessary.

The benefits from Whisp are crystal clear: With no more tabs, no more broken links, and no more frustration, Whisp alleviates all the online shopping clutter  and allows users to do what they really want: chat and shop in a fun, easy-to-use way. (They’ve even got their own fashion emojis!)

Whisp just launched last week, but in the coming months we can look forward to a newsfeed feature and an app for the iPhone.

Photo: Whisp

We were lucky enough to speak with Moncef Zizi a few weeks ago before Whisp’s official launch last Friday. See below for an excerpt of our exclusive interview with the co-founder where we learn all about how Whisp could be the future of e-commerce.

SB: Where does the name Whisp come from?

MZ: Whisp is short for Whisper, and the idea was the capture the privacy and intimacy of those [fashion] conversations.

SB: How do you expect users to integrate Whisp into their shopping experience?

MZ: I think one of the things that we really, really worked on was making the shopping experience super simple, super easy, and super intuitive. …When you go to websites there are always a ton of categories, and some websites like Pinterest are not fashion specific, so the very first thing we did is try to create value by simplifying that user flow and really making search very easy and seamless, and sharing, too. …We  integrated Whisp into the natural flow of how people share links and products.”

SB: How do you want Whisp to change the fashion conversation?

MZ: Our aspiration is to change the way people talk about fashion, not necessarily bringing a completely new way of talking about fashion, but making it much more effective. If you look at the landscape of fashion, there is absolutely no player or no application that comes at the intersection between online shopping and messaging. And it’s such a natural thing to do–to ask people for recommendation. …We really wanted to capture that, what we call, ‘social conversation’ around fashion. Those conversations are much more powerful than a tweet that gets lost, and they’ve very personal. And that’s really the challenge that Whisp faces, is to capture those conversations, make them fun, beautiful, and integrate them into the shopping experience.

SB: What’s the one thing our readers must know and take away from learning about Whisp?

MZ: It would be Whisp is a place that seamlessly integrates shopping and private conversation, in a fun way.

Whisp is available for download at in the App Store here, and you can also sign up for an account at Whisp.com.

The post StyleBlazer Exclusive: Meet Whisp, An Online Shopping Destination Hoping To Be The Future Of E-Commerce appeared first on StyleBlazer.