Mutex.me finds coveted sales on this season's hottest luxury fashions

Mutex.me finds coveted sales on this season’s hottest luxury fashions

By Francis Bea February 19, 2013

Online luxury shopping is a cluttered industry filled with daily deals services, online boutiques, user-generated fashion sites, and fashion blogs.

But Shoppers want more, especially something that’s better adapted to the fleeting nature of fashion. While fashion e-commerce sites like ShopStyle or Gilt Groupe and The Fancy work, there’s a missing element. These curation-based fashion platforms rely on the non-professional hive to surface what’s hot – that would require investing time in finding ahead of the curve news from experts.

This is why founder Lloyd Ho and co-founders Meng Yang, and Kenneth Hui, came up with Mutex.me. This fashion aggregation site keeps a close eye on only the top luxury fashion brands, curates the styles that are in this season, and alerts its users when an item goes on sale.

To be clear, buying something on “sale” doesn’t mean that the fashion is out of season. Department stores will list a trendy in-season product on a bargain, as a part of its meticulous sales strategy. For example, Ho noticed that a major luxury department store will choose one of 10 trending bags and put that bag on sale at 60 percent off for one day only. It’s these types of types of sales that Mutex specializes in.

With this in mind, Mutex.me’s founders guarantee that you’ll be alerted to new sales from major department stores including Saks, Bloomingdales, Bergdorf Goodman, and even top fashion ecommerce sites like BlueFly and Shopbop, before you find them anywhere else. They can make the guarantee since one of Mutex.me’s advantages and speed over its competitors is its engine that bubbles up apparel and accessories the instant they go on sale.

This is how the engine works: Mutex.me scours over 50 brands using an algorithmic crawler, but the trio sets parameters like brand, price, and item type, to narrow down the products they want their algorithm to aggregate. Yang then puts on her editor hat and decides what apparel and accessories make the cut and what doesn’t based on her fashion expertise.

Users can then browse Mutex.me or set email alerts for items they’re watching and click-through the images displayed on its site to make a purchase on the original source of the apparel or accessory on Bluefly.com or Saks.com for instance.

The products that make the front page are typically influenced by this season’s trends so Mutex.me’s users won’t have to worry about falling behind sartorially, but Hui adds that there are some classic designs thrown into the mix. When it comes to classics though, the classic products they decide to list are more data driven than fashionable but with good reason. After tracking its user’s habits, the team then knows the types of styles shoppers will buy from iconic luxury brands. It shouldn’t surprise you when buyers of Burberry apparel on sale are typically scooping up anything with the iconic Burberry “check” pattern, and buyers of YSL bags want styles with the iconic “Y.”

It’s worth mentioning that the fashion platform doubles as a fashion watch dog for its users. And there’s a good reason for this. Items will “sell out in minutes,” Ho tells me. So users can “Watch” items in case the product is back in stock, or if you’re lucky the price drops even further.

Mutex.me has been in stealth mode for a little over half a year, and while you haven’t heard of Mutex.me until now but it’s already proving itself in sales. With just 30,000 users and 3,500 visits per day, Mutex.me has sold $150,000 worth of products in January alone, for a total of $650,000 since its inception.

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