Enterprise: Mys Tyler
Why they stand out: Every two minutes, a woman somewhere in the world downloads this styling app designed to make shopping for clothes online less tricky.
In 2014, Sarah Neill was living in New York and working in telecommunications when she first had the idea that would become her successful start-up Mys Tyler. “I started fleshing out the concept of an app where you could discover fashion influencers with the same height and size for body-relevant fashion inspiration,” Sarah explains. “I came up with the name – My Styler is Mys Tyler – and registered the domain.”
Sarah was excited by the idea but her full-time role was demanding and she didn’t have the time to get the business off the ground. However, she had previously founded a start-up and wanted to be an entrepreneur again, so the idea kept gnawing away at her. In 2019, she quit her job, left New York to return to Australia, joined Antler’s Sydney incubator program and officially launched Mys Tyler in March 2020.
“To encourage users to rediscover the clothes they already own, we’re serving up a daily prompt.”
Mys Tyler’s mission is to make buying clothes online easier. “Clothes have sizes, but most women wear a range based on style and brand,” Sarah explains. “Height and shape also impact how things fit, complicating it further. Most items are shown on a single model, so unless you happen to be that height and size, it’s not a good indicator of how [a garment] will fit you. When users sign up to Mys Tyler, our FIT algorithm matches them with like-bodied creators – showing what fits, how it looks and how they’ve styled it, increasing fit confidence.”
Sarah has recently expanded the brand’s offering through the launch of her Daily Inspiration initiative. “Most of us wear 20 per cent of our wardrobes 80 per cent of the time – it’s easy to fall into the habit of rotating a few outfits,” Sarah bemoans. “To encourage users to rediscover the clothes they already own, we’re serving up a daily prompt, like leather, floral, cut-out etc, and showing how creators are styling it.”
On the basis that constraints breed creativity and the fact that lots of women struggle daily with the question, “What should I wear?”, she believed people would check out Mys Tyler to see the Daily Inspiration and try something new. “It’s a simple, easy way we can help users have more fun with fashion,” Sarah enthuses.
Prior to the Daily Inspiration, Mys Tyler was focused on showing only body-relevant creators and content. “While women love this functionality, it meant they were only seeing a fraction of our beautiful creators, and their amazing content,” Sarah says. “Users kept telling us how much they loved seeing the diversity of women in our community, so it presented an opportunity to share more content through ‘Daily Inspo’.”
The results of the initiative have exceeded expectations. “Creators are having fun posting more often, users are trying the prompts and rediscovering their wardrobes, and feedback is overwhelmingly positive,” she says. The statistics support this assertion – returning users jumped 92 per cent after ‘Daily Inspo’ launched, post likes on Mys Tyler more than doubled in its first month, and posts jumped 58 per cent.
The initiative has helped Mys Tyler hit some big milestones early on, with a woman somewhere in the world downloading the app every two minutes, over 1000 creators coming on board, 18,000+ outfits being posted, and the brand’s online community growing 15 per cent, month-on-month. “In saying that, we have so many more plans for the future,” Sarah avers. “We’re still young, and we haven’t yet built all the features we had planned for launch 18 months ago. Now that we have so much content, we need tools to help navigate it, for instance being able to filter ‘cocktail dress for cold weather’.” And Sarah is already expanding Mys Tyler into hair and beauty – two more categories in which physical attributes are again very relevant, she says.
This article first appeared in issue 37 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
