photo: le 21eme
When you go shopping, you can be positive a few things are going to happen: You’ll be approached and greeted by a sales person who wants to help you shop, you’ll pick out a few items that you think will look good on you, you try them all on, and you buy what you like a ditch what you don’t. But, not all of us have the time or the luxury to go from store to store to find what we need.
And so, we online shop. It’s convenient, it’s quick, and it’s efficient. But it’s not entirely foolproof. More often than not, you buy something online that doesn’t quite fit right. All you’ve done is essentially paid to try something on and then subsequently return it. Retail stores never make you pay before trying on clothes, so why does it work that way online?
Meet Lyon + Post, a new shopping website that tackles both the difficulties of shopping in-store and the annoyances of shopping online. The site, which launched last month, doesn’t make you pay for something if you don’t love it.
MORE: The 50 Best Shopping Sites for Girls on a Budget
So, what is it, and how does it work?
Lyon + Post is similar to any online shopping site, minus the “shopping cart” and the “check out” button. The shopping car” is replaced by a “queue.” As you shop on the site, you add items to your queue that you’re interested in– not necessarily ready to buy. Once you are ready, you fill in your shipping and credit card details and everything in your queue is shipped to you to “try” rather than “buy.”
You then have seven days to try on and contemplate your new items from the comfort of your home and at your leisure– say goodbye to dressing rooms. What ever you don’t want to keep, you can send back to Lyon + Post in a return pouch provided with each shipment. What you decide to keep will then be charged to the card you originally provided.
We asked Lyon + Post’s founder and CEO Lawrence Wisne why he thought the fashion world needed another online store. His answer: “online shopping for clothing is backwards and broken. We learned 100 years ago that selling clothes in a retail store was best done by giving customers access to the clothes for free and letting them try the pieces before spending any money. But in the shift to e-commerce, that knowledge was ignored and the entire model was built exactly backwards from the proven model.”
We can’t argue with him: It’s easy to see why not paying for anything upfront takes a great deal of uncertainty out of online shopping, and makes it fun again.
The really good news: Lyon + Post doesn’t carry a bunch of brands you’ve never heard of. Similar to sites like Shopbop, it carries on-trend fashion-girl favorites like Equipment, Joie, Sachin + Babi, Bec & Bridge, Courtshop Denim, Current Elliott, Paige Denim, Cynthia Vincent, Raoul, and LNA (just to name a few). Vince, The Kooples, A.L.C., and DVF will all be on the site in May for summer/pre-fall.
Basically, we should all be doing cartwheels right about now. Check out the site and sign-up here!