“Social shopping” is the intriguing offspring of social networking and online shopping, and it can offer your growing business just the marketing leg up it needs. Insiders know that listing their own products on the right social shopping sites can build buzz that leads to sales. This accessible form of word-of-mouth marketing offers a wealth of opportunities for entrepreneurs with limited budgets.

Social Shopping sites serves the role of social networking sites like MySpace by helping online companies like DM build up trust and understanding between them and their customers. The really cool thing about this emerging crop of social websites however is its potential for providing small guys the ability to create buzz for their brand and products. Not buzz that comes indirectly from an editor's opinion or anything like that, but the really honest, effective buzz that originates from the people that matter, the young shoppers online that influence the buying habits of others.

Some of the popular social shopping websites out there are:

ThisNext.com
Crowdstorm.com
Kaboodle.com
Stylehive.com
Wists.com

You can help DressMonkey's word-of-mouth campaign by visiting these sites and sharing/commenting on our products. These sites are actually pretty cool to check out, as they reflect a wide range of personal tastes and allows for an enormous amount of online conversation to take place. You can set up a profile, meet new friends, build/share wishlists, give/receive recommendations and rate products you're thinking of buying, learn what's popular, find customer-specific information on all the crap that's out there to buy, and much more. We just recently became a part of this online community. With what appears to be a breeding ground for consumer mavens, there's a great opportunity for DressMonkey and its limited marketing/PR budget to leverage these social shopping websites by sharing its premium products and services and dishing out something for people to buzz about.

From the March edition of Entrepreneur Magazine

Random scenes from DressMonkey In Switzerland!

First off, apologies to our tens of readers who were anxiously checking their RSS feeds to see what new stories of Chinese business culture oddities I would post next, we've been F#$#'n busy. I found a new factory, sourced our spring fabric line, and built a website? Thought I was just playing PSP? Well I did a little of that too, but that was mostly on the bus, next to the usual array of chickens, elderly peasants, and strange fruit (if you have been on a Chinese train or bus anywhere outside of a major metropolitan area, you should know exactly what I'm talking about).

In addition to bringing DressMonkey to market, I went travelling in Switzerland for 2 weeks. I recently went there to see my lovely frau who is there for 3 months (but gets back on Wednesday) from training. I actually was doing work in Switzerland, every day I would get up and take the (damn expensive) train to Luzern and hack away for hours, testing our retail site alongside the most blatantly American tourists I've ever come across. Something about being outside your home country, or maybe even your second-home country, and you realize just how fucking hilarious we Americans can be when some among us travel abroad, herded around by buses full of Stan's and Linda's from Boise (no offense to Stan and Linda from Boise). But there I was, testing our retail site in arguably the cleanest, most beautiful area in Europe. Ok, it wasn't all work, I discovered muesli, and I'm freaking hooked.

So, our retail site which will soon come to being on www.dressmonkey.com, will be visible in the next few days. I would like to issue a certain, exact date, but usually things don't ever really work out when you do that. I've been doing that since the beginning of Dressmonkey, making a time-line on visio for this, or that. I'm unbuckling my schedule-freak belt and I'm just going to let this one go online when its good and ready. We're right now in the final fix phase, where our developers make the last fixes to the problems we've identified after their final delivery some weeks ago. I expect we'll be up by the end of the week, and odds are that if your reading this entry, your on our mailing list so don't worry, we'll let you know. If not, email jeff@dressmonkey.com to join it.

The retail site you'll see soon is the product of a lot of hard work, countless delays, 1 developer abandonment, 2 photo shoots, 20 Friday nights spent all by my lonesome (while working on DressMonkey, and reading digg.com), and a few thousand other countable examples which I can't recall due to the fact that I think I'm losing my mind at the age of 26. I really hope that you enjoy the site, its launch will be THE defining moment for our young company. Its success will be one small step for monkeys, and one giant leap for those who think that leaving your seemingly dead end job for a crazy idea might actually be worth the risk. Check us out, very soon, at www.dressmonkey.com

A screenshot from our website, now being uploaded to www.dressmonkey.com

We're uploading the site right now as I write this. After I told our factory manager that we were going live in the next few days, he had this to say in his almost incomprehensible Zhejiang Chinese: "First off, congratulations, but you know that problems don't just disappear when you have successfully started a business." I meditated on that for a moment, and realized that he could have either been foreshadowing that he was preparing to employ one of the thousand and one ways in which he could screw us over with, or if he was referring to the "teething phase" that all small businesses must go through on their routes to greatness. I truly hope he meant the latter, but only time will tell.

So...our website! It's almost arrived at its final destination, and once it does we need to do some final tests and then we're good to go! So, keep your eyes glued to www.dressmonkey.com over the next 24-48 hours (you can sleep after), we'll be up with a new website which we hope will impress you as much as Roomba impresses us, which is a lot.

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence you tried.

We at DressMonkey wouldn't dare...though we're not shy to admit to the minor technical issues we're fixing ahead of our launch. Coley and I are currently testing the life out of our website, massaging the minor kinks out of our backend (wow that sounds dubious, if not downright naughty). The flood of emails we've received anticipating our launch has been well received, thank you!

It's looking like our site won't be up until Sunday or Monday. But don't let this delay ruin your weekend. For those of you in Los Angeles looking to party for a great cause, check out Philantro Productions debut event Saturday night at the Spider Club. Tons of young professionals will be there supporting the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. DressMonkey is a member, and will be looking into partnership opportunities with the organization this summer while I'm up in LA...

After a lot of work, and far too many delays, we have a retail site. Check us out at www.dressmonkey.com

or, check out this funny picture.

Install our web widget onto your website or blog and we'll make you a free blazer! For more information, please email Jeff at jeff@dressmonkey.com.

Only 48 hours young, and the Monks vitals are looking healthy!!!

It's been fun playing the role of customer service representative during our launch party this week. So far it's the folks in Washington DC who have outshined the rest! New York, you're close behind...

Thank you Wesley, Michael, Mary Jane, Stefanie, Sean, Noah, Chris, Craig, and Mike for being the first to request your own free swatch book.

There I was, flipping through these pictures and suddenly, images of a certain Tarantino flick popped into my mind. Its lack of relevance to the post is insignificant, they are just cool pictures, thanks Charlie!

We've had a good week at DressMonkey HQ, had a lot of inquiries, tons of traffic, and a few orders! I think we're planting the seeds for some eventual orders as well, as the fabric swatch books have been a hit thus far. We had some server trouble on Thursday, and if you visited the site on Thursday morning you might have been annoyed (as were we) that the site wasn't up. It was a technical thing says the hosting company, and they assured us that it would never happen again, so we hope...

I'm finally taking a "chill day", after a week of factory and website fun, I'm now being subjected to watching a masculinity-threatening show with ze German.

Please continue to send us feedback on the site, we appreciate what you've said thus far, and we're going to start making a round of improvements in a few weeks.

DressMonkeys all across America are showing up to parties this weekend (just 5 days after the company's launch), giving new meaning to being "fashionably late."