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"  Photo: Mallzee Not only can it be overwhelming to parse through the racks at a department store for a quick fashion pick-me-up, but it&amp;#039;s also time-consuming. Even worse? Sometimes you can&amp;#039;t find anything you like in your size and have to hightail it over to a different store. But now, a new Tinder-esque shopping app is revolutionizing the way we browse. Mallzee brings all your favorite fashion brands to your fingertips: Just swipe right if you like what appears on the screen and left if you don&amp;#039;t. If you&amp;#039;re unsure about an item, your friends can play fashion police and vote a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to weigh in. Here, we spoke to Cally Russell, the brains behind the personalized shopping app, about Mallzee and how it&amp;#039;s changing the mobile shopping landscape. Can you tell me about your background? What are your ties to the fashion and tech industries? It&amp;#039;s an unusual one: I actually started off in PR and marketing. I worked on a range of different accounts from cancer charities to corporate brands to the National Health Service in the UK. I think my connection to both [tech and fashion] is just passion in each sector. I am a geek. I think technology is a really exciting and I love it, but I couldn&amp;#039;t code to save myself. What was the inspiration behind Mallzee and its fun name? The inspiration came down to wanting to create something that really helped people find clothes online. We found it more and more difficult to find the clothes that we liked online due to the number of retailers and the number of items they all had. We built Mallzee to fix these problems. Due to the issues we had ourselves, we knew there was a gap in the industry. The name came from the idea that we brought together 200-plus stores in one place and not just a selection of products. We like to think of it as an online shopping mall. The &amp;#039;zee&amp;#039; part of the name just makes it unique. A lot of people compare Mallzee&amp;#039;s swiping ability to Tinder. How does the swiping capability cater to your users? It works really well in fashion for a couple of reasons. First, it really does mimic swiping through racks, so when you go shopping you actually do swipe through the clothes as you are looking in a store. Because our product is all about personalization, we built on this fantastic personal recommendation technology, and we use it to get smarter and smarter. As a product, it&amp;#039;s really important for us to be able to get your opinion on things that you like and you don&amp;#039;t like. It makes it really, really fresh. That level of feedback makes it much easier for us to recommend clothes. How do you know what style appeals to what user? Every time you swipe we look at the product and use this information to build a style graph for you. This is what we base your style appeal on: The more you swipe, the more accurate your style graph will become. One of the girls who is one of our kind of fashion people will come back to you with an opinion rather quickly, and she bases this information on current season trends, the team&amp;#039;s styling backgrounds, and your previous interactions with Mallzee. We&amp;#039;ll never recommend something unless we think it would be perfect for you. Compared to other shopping sites, Mallzee creates a community with the shareability function. What was the thought process behind that? When you go shopping I&amp;#039;m sure you ask someone&amp;#039;s opinion. You may ask someone&amp;#039;s opinion in the store or you&amp;#039;ll send a picture to a friend. But when shopping online, that doesn&amp;#039;t really happen. However, shopping is one of the most social things that you can do. Previously, people would share on Facebook and that type of stuff, but we realized that shopping is social, yet still very personal. It&amp;#039;s not about sharing it with 100 people or even 30 people. It&amp;#039;s about having that conversation with people whose opinions really, really matter to you, and that&amp;#039;s a big part of why we do sharing just within our app.  Photo: Mallzee What does Mallzee provide that shopping online does not? What sets the two apart? What we&amp;#039;re really proud of is that we bring so many different stores to one single place. I think that&amp;#039;s really important for us to have 200 stores all within the one app. On the same side of things, that social element\u2014the ability to actually share outfits with your friends and get their input before you buy\u2014is really important. When it comes to shopping online, sometimes you lose and it&amp;#039;s actually quite difficult to get opinions that quickly when you are just shopping by yourself. You recently added Saks and Nordstrom to your retailer list. What other big name stores are available through Mallzee? We&amp;#039;ve got a huge range. As you mentioned we&amp;#039;ve got Nordstrom locked in. We just added Zalando, which is huge all across Europe. We&amp;#039;ve got ASOS, Urban Outfitters, Topman, Topshop, River Island, and the list goes on and on. With that store lineup, who would you say are your ideal users? We prefer to think of ourselves as high street plus. So, we target high street fashion and above. That&amp;#039;s where we feel really comfortable, and I think that sort of level lends itself really well to mobile shopping. There is obviously a lot of overlap between fashion and technology, from wearable tech to fashion-focused apps. What do you think about the two industries merging? I think it&amp;#039;s a really exciting time. Fashion is such a big industry that by combining it with technology, we will create some massively exciting opportunities. For us, the two coming together creates opportunities to make truly personal shopping experiences for everyone. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/shopping/news/a24843/mallzee-tinder-like-shopping-app/>