If the movie “Clueless” was remade today, fashionista Cher Horowitz might use a phone app instead of a computer program to help her pick out the perfect outfit.
If the movie “Clueless” was remade today, fashionista Cher Horowitz might use a phone app instead of a computer program to help her pick out the perfect outfit.
And that app might look like Cinderly.
Co-founded by former Big Island resident Laura Von Holt, the free iPhone app launches early next month. It’s billed as the first “data-driven style app.”
“I spend a lot of time on Instagram looking for style inspiration,” Von Holt, 36, said Wednesday.
Instagram “got pretty big in the fashion community because it’s so easy to share photos,” she said. A quick search for the Outfit of the Day, hashtag #ootd, brings up more than 82 million posts.
Although it’s easy to see how cute an outfit can be via Instagram, it’s more difficult to visualize how that shirt might look on a different user with a different body type.
Cinderly eliminates the problem with the wave of a magic wand (or rather, the calculations of an algorithm) that creates a customized style feed based on a user’s dress size.
The app is “a fashion fairy godmother, matching people with their perfect fashion,” Von Holt said.
The feed is a crowdsourced runway, comprised entirely of real people and their daily outfits. Users can search what people are wearing across ZIP codes, from Halifax in Canada to Hilo, filtering through styles ranging from rock star to business. Von Holt’s style leans old-school.
“My grandmother lives in Honolulu, and she was always wearing amazing muumuus,” she said. “Anything that looks vintage and has really big earrings and sunglasses — if I thought my grandmother would wear it in 1979, I’ll probably wear it now.”
Born in Kona, Von Holt grew up in Waimea and graduated from Hawaii Preparatory Academy before moving to New York for college. Her parents own Kohala’s Ponoholo Ranch. Sister and brother-in-law Mele and Mike Bennett own Pau restaurant.
Von Holt now lives in New York City.
“Manhattan is also an island, and I am an island girl,” she said.
The aloha spirit played a significant role as Cinderly was being developed by Von Holt and co-founder Lucas Stoffel. One of the app’s defining features is the “No Trolling Pledge” every user agrees to. Trolling and cyberbullying is verboten in the community; trolls are banished to “far, far away,” Von Holt said.
“I wanted it to be really, really positive,” she said. “I was kind of inspired by growing up in Hawaii because people are by default nice there, and that’s how online should be.”
The process of creating an app is “kind of a wild ride,” Von Holt said. “You have a concept, you kind of sketch it out, and you have to hire somebody to build it.” In the case of Cinderly, that somebody was Australian app developer David McKinney, who also built Product Hunt and Emoji Type.
Throughout development, Von Holt and Stoffel sought feedback from high school students and “anyone young that we know.”
Some planned features will roll out after launch, but one that Von Holt is particularly excited about allows users to amplify the “Likes” they give and receive by purchasing “Super-Likes” from an in-app store (the app itself remains free).
After the annual Collision tech conference in New Orleans this year, Cinderly was named one of the top five startups to watch by MediaPost.
“I love the idea that girls can wake up in the morning and take a photo and be applauded for expressing themselves and being who they are,” Von Holt said.
“The iPhone is the closest thing we have to modern magic,” she said. “We can make anything happen with it.”
Cinderly will be available in the App Store on July 6.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.