5 Immediate Improvements to Omiru

February 24th, 2008

Hi everybody,

You love Omiru for our…

• Style Q&As
• Trend Articles
• Ready Made Outfits
• Shopping Finds

And here’s where we have room for improvement…

• Organization: Useful articles are buried, and they’re really hard to find.
• Pictures:  In particular, more pictures are needed to illustrate answers to the Q&As.
• Shopping Finds: Our shopping picks aren’t cheap enough overall, and the ones that are come from the same few places. 
• Men’s Articles: Omiru has plenty of women’s articles, but there’s not enough here for the guys.  Plus, the guys don’t know when the men’s articles will be posted.
  
• Polls (and Runway Reviews): They aren’t as useful as the Style Q&As, Trend Articles, and Ready Made Outfits.  Polls, in particular, could be better if they focused on emerging trends or trends that aren’t obviously In.

While our long-term improvement plan for Omiru is still in the works, we’ve identified a few changes we can make immediately.  Here’s five ways we can make Omiru better for you right away:

• More Pictures: They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ll be adding more illustrations to our Q&As, trend articles, and of course, the ready made outfits.
• More Men’s Articles: We’ll dedicate one day a week (Wednesday) to men’s articles.  We know this isn’t a lot, but on our priority list is expanding our men’s coverage further in the future. 
• Refocused Poll: Instead of asking if something’s In or Out, we’ll ask whether you’d wear it or not.  Identifying which trends you actually want to wear (whether they’re in or not) is more relevant to "real style for real people" than figuring out which trends are In or Out.
• More Reasonable Shopping Options: We’ll work on diversifying our shopping picks so they come from more stores–and where possible, we’ll lower the price point on the items that we do feature.
• More How to Wear a Trend and Ready Made Outfit Articles: We’ll diversify our regular article selection beyond Style Q&As and the Polls.

The one caveat: in order to support our
new-and-improved article lineup, we’re going to have to throttle back
on our answers to your reader questions.  The team here will still be
answering as many questions as humanly possible, but unfortunately, we won’t be able to answer all of them.  If you already asked your question, though, we promise you an answer. 

As for longer term changes, the two most requested features are (1) a lookbook, and (2) a forum where you can ask and answer reader questions (especially since our question queue is super long right now, and a lot of you are waiting on answers from us!).  Consider both to be on our will-be-added-to-Omiru list.

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