Why do all e-commerce sites display products in grids—tiny thumbnails on a white background? Three years ago Neha Singh was convinced she could improve the online shopping experience, and she left a job as Director of Product at Vogue.com—where she was responsible for building Vogue Runway’s fashion show interface as well as the VR app—to do it.
Singh, an MIT Computer Science alum, launched Obsess in mid-2017, as a B-to-B service, custom-making immersive shopping environments for the likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Levi’s. Today, she and her team of seven are powering up their new consumer offering, ShopObsess.co, an online destination with 19 unique virtual stores across which approximately 700 items are for sale (the site operates on an affiliate model not unlike Farfetch). In the mix are shops dedicated to the tie-dye trend, to denim, to yoga, and to wellness, a party boutique, and influencer-curated stores. Prices go from high to low—luxury to affordable—and Instagram brands with values important to millennials and Gen Z, like sustainability and diversity, are emphasized. “You can follow these brands individually, but it’s hard to get them all in one place,” says Singh. Just don’t go looking for a search function; the site doesn’t have one. “It’s really about discovery.”
In that sense, ShopObsess.co recreates the IRL boutique experience, but it does brick-and-mortar one better: “We don’t have to be limited by what’s possible in real life,” says Singh, as she swipes left and right on the site’s CGI-enabled “underwater” store, which showcases coral-colored clothes from Altuzarra, Zimmermann, and Maje alongside handbags by Chanel and Louis Vuitton as fish swim by in the aquarium that surrounds the shopping space. “It’s a whole different way of looking at the e-commerce interface—intuitive.”
It beats a thumbnail grid, sure, but the implications for the future of shopping—and fashion—are profound. When 5G launches, says Singh, “the [Obsess] experience will become even more interactive, more photorealistic, and faster to load.” Eventually, too, the site will be dynamically merchandised, meaning that it will learn your preferences, and the items that you see will be targeted to your tastes. And that’s just for starters. “In the long term future of Augmented Reality glasses—and later contact lenses—our eye view will become our screen,” she explains. “Digital information and objects will often be indistinguishable from physical objects, and a new layer of digital fashion will emerge where items won’t need to be manufactured physically, but will be ‘worn’ in this AR realm virtually.”
For the time being, Singh says she’ll judge Obsess a success “when we get users engaged with the new format—if they love discovering products in this way and they have fun while shopping here. Our mission is to make shopping fun again.”
