I love shoes. For those of you who’ve seen me hanging around the Leo Burnett building, you know this to be true.  If it weren’t for pesky things like rent and food, I would pretty much spend all of my monthly paycheck on shoes. So imagine my excitement when I discovered Shoedazzle.com – a personalized members-only shoe heaven. For those of you who get your funky accessory fix from jewelry, don’t worry JewelMint.com has you covered.

The idea behind sites like Shoedazzle and Jewelmint is a simple one – celebrity-curated fashion in an easy subscription service. They offer affordable prices, quick and easy shipping and, here’s the key, complete personalization. When you sign up for either of these sites (it’s free!) you answer a few simple questions about your fashion tastes, and from there, they build you a style profile that helps Kim Kardashian or Kate Bosworth hand-pick a few unique pieces just for you each month. All items are set at one reasonable price so you can simply choose your favorite piece from your showroom without worrying about busting your budget. Making your first purchase enrolls you in their subscription service, and every month you’ll get a new showroom full of items. They’ll automatically charge you the flat monthly fee and moving forward you can pick whatever you’d like, always with the choice to opt out for the month.

If the idea of picked-just-for-you shoes isn’t enough to get you excited about Shoedazzle, it’s also a stellar example of an integrated online customer service model and social shopping experience. Jewelmint is a bit newer to the game so they haven’t quite amassed the devoted following of Shoedazzle, yet.

Both sites have a Facebook page, but utilize them differently. Shoedazzle’s page is an active community of shoppers and fans, (many of whom have created separate profiles specifically for interacting on this site!). They also use it as a customer service tool, fielding questions and even updating users’ showrooms based on on-site conversations. Jewelmint’s page currently is full of postings from the brand out and doesn’t have the same community feel. Again, both sites encourage social shopping, but to different degrees. Shoedazzle actively enables girls to invite friends to join and to share and shop each other’s showrooms, earning “style points” along the way. Jewelmint encourages users to invite their friends, but there’s opportunity for them to build in more social-shopping functions to the actual experience.

These types of socially enabled, totally personalized shopping experiences are right up our Experience Everything girl’s alley.  This combines all of her favorite things about shopping (getting the latest finds, staying on celebrity trends, sourcing opinions/advice from her BFFs) into one easy place.

As we continue to think about the idea of upping our ante in e-commerce:

• Are there ways we can spruce up the experience?
• Can we utilize some of these social shopping strategies to give more meaning to a subscription service?