Merging arenas
Post Game Fashion looks to be a game changer in fashion, sports arena
Paul and Amanda Barros, founders of PostGameFashion – at Pitch in the City.
David Beckham. Russell Westbrook. Cristiano Ronaldo. What do they have in common? Not only are they all respected and talented athletes but all three have entered into the highly competitive world of fashion with their own clothing lines, endorsement deals and/or partnerships. Beckham has expanded his partnership with H&M to not only include jeans, t-shirts, and jackets but also underwear. Earlier this year, Westbrook partnered with True Religion as the creative director of the brand’s spring 2015 campaign, “Be So Bold,” and professional footballer Cristiano Ronaldo developed an underwear and sock line called CR7 in collaboration with New York designer Richard Chai.
The merging of fashion and sports was on display in New York over — a mid-February weekend — when New York Fashion Week and the NBA All-Star weekend overlapped. Exhibit A: LeBron James’ Springhill Production Company produced the very first NBA fashion show, All-Star All-Style.
Closer to home, siblings Paul and Amanda Barros have stepped into the same arena of fashion and sports with the creation of their online site www.postgamefashion.com, where fans can purchase the latest trends in fashion, accessories, sneakers and gadgets worn by their favorite athletes at an affordable price. Customers can mix and match styles by creating their own profiles on the site using Facebook or an email address.
The brother and sister team graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Paul in 2001 and Amanda in 2009. They grew up on Dudley Street in Roxbury, surrounded by an entrepreneurial spirit. Their dad and uncles ran a couple of family small businesses, including a bar, a grocery store and a liquor store. “Growing up in that environment influenced me on pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors,” says Paul. He recalls the times it was tough growing up in the neighborhood, but says he wouldn’t change how he was brought up.
The siblings hope to make an impact with their retail website. It’s backed by a team of fashion experts, stylists and trendsetters who curate outfits worn by popular athletes such as LeBron James, Chris Paul, Stephen Curry, Tom Brady, Kevin Durant, Colin Kaepernick and more. Post Game Fashion’s target customers are males between the ages of 17-39 years old.
Smarter in the City
Post Game Fashion was developed with the support of Smarter in the City, a high-tech accelerator based in Dudley Square that provides opportunities for urban entrepreneurs to develop innovative products and services in the high tech sector. Paul and Amanda were among the first “cohort” or start-ups accepted into the six-month program that ran from July 2014 to January 2015. Other local startups included Headthought, KillerBoomBox, Mbadika and Practice Gigs.
Initially, their business model was called TrendOn.TV. “Our concept was to take images that you saw on television and we’d take those outfits, like your favorite actors, actresses, and then you curate them and show people where they can go and buy them,” says Paul. However, the facial recognition software required for TrendOn.TV was very rudimentary and imprecise. Paul explains that “we didn’t want to alienate our users as far as a blue shirt that’s really a pink shirt. We kind of reengineered the company, with some guidance from Smarter in the City.”
Smarter in the City suggested that Paul and Amanda find a niche so they could focus on and hone a concept. “We went back and circled the wagons,” says Paul, recalling how they went from TrendOn.TV to Post Game Fashion. Discussing his and Amanda’s interests, he described how they both like sports and fashion and noticed that both industries were being heavily discussed in their circles, so they made the decision to combine both worlds for their company.
Rather than image recognition software, the sibling entrepreneurs decided to use real people: stylists, curators and trendsetters who “physically look at the outfit and go ‘Yes, these are the options that we can match.’ It’s not a machine now. It’s actually a human being,” says Paul.
Amanda is responsible for the marketing, social media and hiring contributors. Images of athletes and what they’re wearing are gathered from numerous sources, ranging from high-end exclusive A-list events to scrolling through Twitter, Instagram and other social media outlets. The team has a simple system of “a thumbs up or thumbs down” approach that determines which images will be posted to the site.
Paul handles the business end of the company, and says their business model relies on affiliated linkage. That means Post Game Fashion relies on a third-party aggregator or affiliated marketer. “We actually developed our own back-end search engine, where if we’re looking for a blue shirt we can type ‘blue shirt’ in our query and all the vendors that carry a blue shirt will show up. Our goal is to match it as exactly as we can using the talents of a stylist or a curator.”
Helping stylists
Customers are offered several options for the clothing items worn by the athletes, as well as three price points for the fashion. Amanda believes the site will help the stylists as well. She says a lot of the stylists’ work is fragmented across social media platforms; they have a Facebook or a Twitter page along with other social media handles, and oftentimes a website. “For instance, if they [customers] want to follow a certain athlete’s fashion or maybe you just like the way that a particular stylist puts together outfits, there isn’t a platform to go on and see what they’re doing. I see this as an opportunity for the stylists to showcase what they have to offer in terms of their talents and expertise.”
Paul and Amanda have a list of goals for the company. First up is to take Post Game Fashion from a mobile optimized site to an iOS experience. They’re looking to develop an iOS app for their next generation software. Currently, the site is mobile — optimized for different devices. There are still bugs to work out. “When you want to buy an outfit, when you click ‘shop this outfit,’ it takes you to the retailer’s page to buy it, which is somewhat of a fragmented experience,” says Paul. “We look at ourselves as a ‘discovery to purchase’ platform, more on the discovery and less of a purchase platform. We want to be a discovery and a purchase platform. Right now, our business model is an affiliate link-in.”
Every time a customer links over to a retailer such as The Gap, Macy’s or Nordstrom, they make a commission. If a customer decides to buy, they get paid a little bit more. So, it’s a double hit: they get paid for the initial click-through, and once again for the purchase.
Abandonment rate
According to Paul, referring to consumer tendencies to look, but not buy, “the abandonment rate in mobile shopping right now is upwards of 90 percent. In order to increase that conversation rate we want to keep it within the iOS platform. Similar to Uber or any other service, your credit card is on file and you can buy that item in two taps. That’s where we’re going.”
A second and just as important goal is to grow the user base, which they hope will lead to second stage capital investments. Paul states that “our core goal is to provide exotic content that will keep users coming back to the site and keep them engaged.” Over the next six months the duo plan on aggressive networking, scrutiny of site analytics, and eventually, forays to venture capital firms for funding.
They realize that, in a large measure their current success stems from their selection as one of the cohorts in Smarter in the City startup accelerator. “We would have been stuck in mud without Smarter in the City,” says Paul. “What this experience has done for us has plugged us into this startup culture, startup ecosystem in both Roxbury, which has grown, and in the general city. Again, we would not have been able to recreate it if we were on our own.”
This article appears in our May issue of Banner Biz which you can read here.
