New site Svpply is part of a new breed of social shopping sites that look to combine an e-commerce store with the "following" functionality of Tumblr and Twitter, allowing readers to save their favorite e-commerce products to a personalized page, as well as follow other stylish members of the site.
According to co-founder Zach Klein (whose other creations include Vimeo and College Humor), the explicit purpose for visiting the site isn't actually to shop. In fact, Klein describes the site -- which looks more like a minimalist Tumblr page than an overly concepted e-shop -- as more of a "retail rabbit hole," where each click on an appealing item leads you to another.
And while most people do end up shopping, many others enjoy it as much for the inspiration (and aspiration) as for the purchases that they make.
"If you go to Bloomingdale's, you get bombarded with someone trying to 'sell,'" frequent user Will McDonough (a.k.a. WillMcD) told us while shopping vintage tees on his iPad at a downtown cafe. "This allows you to kind of poke around, and gives you a platform to collect things, put them away on a virtual shelf, or just outright buy them when you're ready."
No surprise: Given the no-fuss set-up, the site has proven particularly popular among men -- the staff, in fact, is almost exclusively male. (The site's users overall are evenly split between genders.)
According to Klein, Svpply has taken off with modern, tech-savvy shoppers: "Our generation are the children of innovation, the ones that first experienced mass production and mechanization of everything ... Often, we're now just desperate for quality ... We're returning to a state where we want to purchase one thing and have it last a lifetime."
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— Original video shot by Amanda Martinez/NBCNewYork.com
