The Yes was set to launch in early March but the team pushed its launch date two months to adapt to the industry impacts of COVID-19. Some brands are sitting on huge piles of merchandise; others are in dire need of e-commerce upgrades but don’t have the resources to invest. The Yes allows them to reach new customers while also pushing their backlog of inventory. “We knew that we needed to make this really easy for them,” Bornstein says. “We did all of the heavy lifting so that the partnership is really easy for them from a tech perspective. They don’t have to do a lot of work that they do with other online partners.”
Onboarding brands was largely handled by The Yes’s Creative Director Taylor Tomasi Hill, a familiar fashion industry name from her years at Moda Operandi, Forty Five Ten, and magazines. For Tomasi Hill, The Yes was the needle-moving retail opportunity she’d been searching for. “After our first conversation, I realized how well Julie understood the pain points of brands,” Hill says. “And I was so passionate about giving power back to the brands, really partnering with them and creating something that isn’t pay-to-play and something that doesn’t have marketing that is trying to sell you something.” She adds, “the experience is something that the customer actually creates themselves.”
Tomasi Hill was tasked with finding a visual balance between The Yes branding and the aesthetics of the individual labels themselves. The idea was to follow the Instagram or Pinterest ideal of a playful, collaged look, rather than have models “shot on white with everyone looking like little soldiers.” She says, “one of the things that the brands loved about this concept was that we’re not diluting their point of view. We’re not reshooting anything. They have a vision and often that vision doesn’t get translated because every single retailer has re-shot the look or individual pieces.” The concept works for the customer, too. Shopping, Tomasi Hill says, “is not so much about adjacencies anymore. We are a high-low mix, we’re approachable and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Organic discovery is important to the team at the helm of The Yes, or as organic as can be with sophisticated human-made algorithms. “The way that the algorithm works, there’s a sense of discovery. If there are customers who are liking the same things you are, those things will show up in your feed. It’s not just a platform to show you the exact things you have in your closet; it’s actually a place to discover new fashion.” Also included is the ability to see friends and their “yes” feeds, a feature the team plans to iterate on to make the app even more interactive and community-focused. Innovation is baked into The Yes’s model. As Bornstein says, “we’re an app that has the capability to get better over time.” In this crushing economy and as we emerge from it, that may make the difference.
During the first month of launch, The Yes is donating $1 per download of the app to Good+Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on providing essentials to low-income communities across the country.